


Roses in Rain

by sevendials



Category: Weiss Kreuz
Genre: Comic Horror, Dark Comedy, F/M, M/M, Mystery, Parody
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2006-02-21
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2017-10-21 03:35:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 64,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/220468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevendials/pseuds/sevendials
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aya rescues a mysterious young girl with strange powers and dark secrets. What will happen when her past catches up with her? Why is nobody listening to Ken? And will Weiss ever manage to get rid of her?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beautiful Stranger

**Author's Note:**

> Standard Copyright Disclaimer For Dummies: Guys, I don't own Weiss Kreuz or anything so no matter how much I pray Aya and the rest of the guys don't belong to me. They belong to Kyoko Tsuchiya, Takehito Koyasu and Project Weiss. Please do not sue me, I mean why would you want to? I'm poor! But I do own one character Rain aka Calico, don't take her or feel the wrath of Aya-san's katana!
> 
> Suethor's Notes: Hi! I started a new Weiss ficcie! *dies* I haven't had any inspiration for a while because my WK muse chibibirman hasn't given me any so this is a shocker but a good shocker because I wasn't expecting to get some nice inspiration so suddenly! This fic has NO YOAI*! The main pairing is AyaRanxOc (girl), don't like don't read! There will be mentions of child abuse, blood and DEATH! And some other disturbing things so please don't read if you are easily upset. Now here is the damn fanfic for you all to enjoy hopefully! *waves* Please review it is greatly appreciated but NO FLAMES!
> 
> * We have yaoi instead. And this is not your typical 'new-girl-joins-Weiss' tale.

That was how it began.

Imagine Tuesday, revealing itself in all its business-as-usual glory. Imagine a boringly normal evening and the store, as ever, crowded with all the usual bit-part players: schoolgirls in their, for the most part, unidentifiable uniforms; young mothers; the occasional older woman braving the barbarian hoard that is a load of Tokyo high-schoolers playing cute. Picture Youji – or not; there's no need to picture this bit – sprawled in his usual chair in his usual spot surrounded by the usual crowd of girls, languidly flirting with the more appealing of them. Picture a girl grabbing Omi's arm and him smiling anxiously at her and wishing he could tell her to leave him alone, and Aya watering the roses, an action which seemed somehow horribly deliberate, and trying to ignore it all, and looking like he was flirting with a headache.

Finally there was Ken, trying and trying desperately not to draw attention to himself. Ken was stood at the table, kind-of-but-not-really working on an arrangement and thanking the God he couldn't quite work up the conviction to believe in that he had not only an excuse to ignore the girls but also that he only seemed to attract the shy ones anyway and they didn't usually go much further than staring.

Ken knew it shouldn't have been ordinary, but it was ordinary all the same. Routine, and nothing about it that stuck in the mind as anything out of the usual, anything but just another Tuesday evening in a flower shop that really shouldn't have existed but did and nothing for any of its incongruous staff to do about it but stand there and take it and keep on smiling.

… Though, now Ken allowed himself to think about it, he guessed some of them (naming no names, mind) needed a little more practice in that direction.

Normal busy Tuesday and no custom at all and Ken stared out the window and twisted the stem of a tiger lily he knew he should probably stop messing with before it ended up fatally battered between his fingers, and tried to guess how long it would be before Aya decided to give in to impulse and started yelling at the customers again. Youji, he could tell, was wondering the exact same thing. In fact Youji was wishing (though Ken hadn't quite picked up on this bit) that he had managed to end up a little closer to Ken so they could, perhaps, put a bet on it, when the shop door opened with an irritating little cling of bells and she stepped in.

Her. Not, of course, that Youji or Ken or anybody present cared about her, or even really noticed her at first – why should they have done? She was just another girl walking into a shop full of them and the shop bell only rang, to Youji's mind, just about _all the goddamned time_ …

No. Nobody noticed; Ken certainly didn't. The first thing he noticed was the noise dropping off. Right off, like life was TV and someone had hit Mute. Ken hadn't noticed the noise when it was there, not really, but now it had gone it seemed, to his mind, weird. It _was_ weird. The shop never went silent unless Aya had started shooing the girls out and Ken hadn't heard Aya raise his voice, or even say a word. Shouldn't he have heard Aya shouting? Impossible for him not to look up, his eyes already suspicious. He didn't know what was going on and he never liked that, that feeling at a loss…

He didn't like it at all. He had seldom, if ever, seen an entire roomful of very noisy people go totally quiet all at once and could think of no way to describe it but _freaky_. Really, _really_ goddamned freaky. For a moment he could hear nothing but the noise filtering from the street. Cars. Voices. Life going on regardless, even as the tiny world caught inside the store stopped short, held its breath.

She smiled.

She ducked her head and looked apologetic and smiled through a furious blush and Ken stared and wasn't alone. Absolutely everyone was staring at her and she knew it. She had to know it, didn't she?

Omi, who had one hand raised almost defensively and by the looks of things had been hoping to catch the girl, looked stunned; Youji, on his feet, was the perfect picture of shocked concern. He had already been reaching out to help her up, when he had caught sight of Aya and frozen, one hand still half outstretched, just as everyone stood frozen. The girls, almost to an individual, looked horrified – their eyes wide, their mouths agape, a few of them holding shocked hands to frightened faces, their surprise almost parodic.

Nobody looked good when they'd just fallen over, nobody at all, but somehow _she_ did.

She sat on the floor like a girl in a manga, all disheveled hair and skewed limbs and her school uniform skirt swirled gracefully out around her, showing her thighs in a way Ken refused to believe could have been accidental though he couldn't imagine what else it could possibly be. Her bag had skittered off somewhere to rest by one of the shelves, spilling open and scattering pens and textbooks and notepaper across the floor and Ken didn't believe she was true. Girls fell over cute as that in the stupid true-love manga his older sisters used to like and probably still did, and on TV shows, _and absolutely nowhere else_. They definitely didn't do it in the middle of Tokyo flower shops on a Tuesday afternoon.

And then (Jesus _Christ_ , Ken caught himself thinking, someone's gonna get _killed_ ), then there was Aya and that, to his mind, had to be the absolute worst of it. Aya was sprawled on the floor in front of her, that girl, blinking and looking just about as un-coolly-disdainful as any of his companions thought they had ever seen him…

"Oh shit," Ken heard someone say, and realized it was him.

That was how it began.


	2. Lost Angel

Thursday evening and Ken skipped soccer practice in favor of killing someone.

Funny thing was it didn't seem like a good enough excuse to him and it hadn't ever. It felt like it was up there with convenient sprains or the inopportune colds he had, as a child, fantasized about catching whenever practice coincided with a cold snap or light yet drenching rain, though he'd turned up all the same and complained about the guys who didn't. What else was he supposed to tell the neighborhood kids, though? Better they thought he'd twisted his ankle than someone had shot him in the leg, though Ken understood kids well enough to know they'd be far more interested in bullet wounds than strains and sprains.

Not that anyone had shot at him tonight; the mission had proved so simple it seemed anticlimactic. Couldn't they, where they was someone else, have arrested the guy instead?

"Shit," Youji said, and it was hard for Ken to tell if he was joking or not, "for this I missed my date."  
"Shut up, Kudou." Ken replied, quickly and instinctively. "We all _know_ you've seen more action this month than I will in my entire goddamned lifetime, you don't need to rub it in."  
Youji smiled at him. Broad, languid, irritating; he had a smile that invited Ken to hit it, and hit it hard. "Why, Kenken. I idn't know you cared."  
"I never said I did! I can't believe your fucking ego."

(But maybe, Ken thought, I shouldn't have blushed. Certainly shouldn't have answered so fast. Well, shit.)

There was something vaguely dispiriting about missions that went largely to plan. Something awkward about meeting up again afterward, and the awkward conversation that always followed. It was over and they were alive – right, now what? It had always seemed kind of weird that all there was for it once the guards had been persuaded to see things Weiss' way, the target was down and the site was (as ever, all too often regardless of whether it had been part of the objectives or not) merrily blazing, to turn round and go back home and next thing anyone knew it would be morning and time to open up the store again and go back to pretending to be florists…

"Hey, Youji? Do you reckon I'm a florist pretending to be an assassin or an assassin pretending to be a florist?"  
"As the ancient Chinese would say, Kenken… _don't try to be profound, it doesn't suit you_."

They met up with Omi by the perimeter fence, half-hidden from the cancelled guards in a patch of convenient shadow beneath a convenient overhang that shielded him from the light rain. Alert Omi, tidy and trim as if he hadn't even left the shop (shouldn't, Ken thought, he have had some blood on him somewhere?). Looked, his teammates noted, like he'd had a boring one as well. Hell, Ken suspected even _Aya_ had been bored and Aya had been the one taking down the target. No, they really hadn't needed assassins for that one. He wondered what the Hell Persia thought he was playing at.

"Hey, where _is_ Aya?" He asked suspiciously.  
Omi blinked. "Aya-kun? Oh… he had to go further than he thought to find the target. He says he'll make his own way home."  
Youji smiled wryly, as if he hadn't been at all surprised and probably he hadn't been. "Well, that's Aya for you," he said equably, giving Ken a supposedly playful cuff that nearly knocked him off his feet. "Come on, Kenken. Let's get out of here before this smoke makes my hair smell bad. Besides, I need my beauty sleep if I'm not going to disappoint the girls tomorrow by showing up looking anything less than my best!"  
Ken looked askance at him; if anything, Youji's grin only broadened at the look on Ken's face. "Why do I think your ego should be visible from space?"  
"Why is the building burning anyway?" Omi asked suspiciously, as if the thought the answer to that imponderable might not have found its origin with one of his teammates hadn't even occurred to him. "That wasn't one of the objectives."  
"Ah." Ken grinned suddenly and nervously; both his teammates turned to regard him, Omi in frank distrust, Youji suppressing laughter behind an unconvincing attempt at severity. "Well," Ken volunteered anxiously, "there was this guard… um, well, there was several of them actually, Omi, and I was kind of trapped and I had to think of something to distract them and… uh… it seemed like a good idea at the time?"  
"Ken-kun!"

* * *

The thought that he might have to worry about his teammates didn't even cross Aya's mind as he made his own discreet way from the now-blazing complex, slipping discreet as a ghost through the empty courtyards and gracefully climbing up and jumping over the perimeter fence. They could, as he was well aware, take care of themselves and he had other far more pressing things to think about.

Though he hadn't as yet confided in any of his teammates about the matter (some things one didn't mention over the comm.) the mission hadn't quite gone off as smoothly as the others assumed. No doubt about it, it had been successful – but as far as Weiss were concerned, they needn't have bothered turning up.

Someone had beaten him to the target.

No doubt about that for a moment. Abyssinian – no, Weiss, he reminded himself – beaten to a target! It left Aya feeling somehow cheated. He had slipped into the darkened room the target was hiding in, moving quiet as drifting shadow, and found – nothing. Just a slowly cooling corpse sprawled across the desk in a slowly gathering pool of its own irrelevant blood, and a wound which didn't, even in the eyes of a man accustomed to death, look serious enough to have proved fatal. And more bloodstains on the carpet, and on the windowsill; not, Aya knew, the target's blood. Whoever had done it hadn't got away unmarked either.

They needn't have bothered coming at all. It left Aya irritated, and obscurely worried. Perhaps, he thought, Schwarz had been after their target as well; maybe the target had betrayed his masters. Perhaps – a more alarming thought – Weiss had been compromised. At the very least someone was hiding something from him, all of them: Weiss, as ever, being an afterthought. Maybe Omi could shed some light on the matter. Maybe Youji or Ken had seen something (though that, he admitted, was hardly likely). When he got back, he'd have to —

Which was when he saw the rivulet of blood, hideously dark against the pale paving stones, coursing slowly across the rain-washed sidewalk.

Which was when he saw her.

The girl was huddled against the wall, her long black hair soaking wet and tumbled across her bruised, pallid cheeks; her long dark lashes swept down half-hiding wide, pain-filled orbs. Her arms were pressed against her chest, hiding her wound, but the bloody marks spattered across what had once been a form-fitting light purple tee with a black kitten design betrayed what must have happened. There was more blood on her loose black mini-skirt and her knee high black high heeled boots were spattered with mud as if she had been running. Even though she was soaked through and spattered with her own crimson blood, and her delicate features were marred with bruises and tight with pain, she still looked extraordinarily pretty.

He had been turning from her before her presence really registered with him and had him pausing, turning reluctantly to look at her over his shoulder, then turning back to her. It would have been easier to turn and walk away had the figure in the alleyway been a man, but she wasn't. Frowning, Aya took a pace toward her and at the sound of his footsteps that agonized gaze swiveled toward him and stared at him in fright.

"P… please…" the girl stammered softly, her lashes fluttering as she stared up at him and her words almost lost to the rain, "don't hurt me…"

Aya said nothing, frowning deeply as he gazed upon her, but his stony gaze softened as he regarded her closer. The girl was far younger than he had assumed at first glance – she would, he was sure, be no more than eighteen years old… about the same age, he realized with a sudden shock, as his own sister. Oh and Ken, of course, but Ken hardly counted with Aya at any time and certainly not in comparison with such a girl as this… what could a creature like Ken ever have in common with someone like this girl?

"Help me," She pleaded. Her voice was low, melodious, beseeching.  
It was on the tip of his tongue to say her problems were none of his concern but, for some reason, Aya found he couldn't seem to speak. He simply stood. He caught himself thinking (and the thought felt strange, not at all like one of his own thoughts), who could possibly have wanted to commit such a brutal act on a beautiful young girl? All he managed was a flat, discouraging but rather lame, "I have to go." And he tried to turn away, but he couldn't. Something in him insisted he stand his ground. There was something about this girl…  
"Please—" The girl's entreaty was cut short as her frail body was wracked with a fit of coughing and bright crimson blood welled gently up at the corner of her full lips. "Please, it hurts… so much… I…I'm so scared…" Her voice tailed off and her eyelids fluttered gently closed as she slumped against the harsh brickwork of the wall, her battered form going limp, leaving Aya stood gazing at her in shock. She must, he realized, have lost consciousness.

Even if he was outwardly a little cold Aya couldn't have left this girl to bleed to death in an alleyway. Due to the late hour, the streets around them were utterly deserted – he couldn't trust someone else to and should he leave the girl now Aya had no doubt that she wouldn't survive the night. Rather to his own surprise (it didn't feel like something he should have done, or ever have wanted to do) Aya shrugged off his heavy buckled trench coat and bent down to enfold the girl's lithe body in it, wrapping it tightly around her battered form and lifting her into his arms. Wait, _what_? What in the Hell was all this about?

… but the girl barely weighed a thing.

Hurrying back to his Porsche and gently placing the girl down on the back seats, Aya caught himself rearranging the folds of his coat over her and drew back, startled. What was he doing? Why was he taking a… what in the world was he _doing_? Mentally, he shook himself, blinking and taking stock (you're not yourself, Fujimiya). What was going on? He was alone in a side street with a bleeding stranger in his Porsche, someone he'd never met before, someone who could have been anybody: his next target, a plant, a danger in an attractive package. It didn't matter that this was a girl, a young and beautiful one at that, and—

He glanced back into the car. Back down at the figure on the back seat; his eyes, previously narrowed in thought, grew grave, even troubled. The girl.

… no, she couldn't ever have been an enemy. A girl like this, so innocent, so afraid, couldn't possibly be a target in the making. There was something about her, something that told Aya she was, somehow, different. She was an innocent, she had been hurt, probably by the same people Weiss had been sent to kill… and wasn't it their duty to protect the blameless from the dark beasts who threatened their happiness? It was, almost, a duty to protect this girl…

An inexplicable action, explained away all too easily.

* * *

So this was what insanity looked like.

Ken had long suspected he and his teammates were penciled in for a good shot at lunacy and had occasionally found himself wondering how in the Hell he'd go about recognizing craziness when it _did_ show up. Now, though, he thought he knew and knew exactly.

Insanity looked like a soaking wet Aya – Aya Fujimiya, for Christ's sakes! – showing up in the basement holding a total stranger in his arms, a total stranger who was wearing _his_ freaking trench coat, and demanding the three of them (all staring at him, the perfect picture of total bewilderment; what do you think you're _doing_ , Aya?) fetch a first-aid kit and blankets and towels and clean clothing and, in all likelihood, a three-course meal. Insanity was a guy who knew the value of secrecy only too well, knew it in his blood, deciding to render any notion Weiss might have entertained of _cover_ completely moot. That was insanity. That was batshit crazy in its purest form.

"I think we've lost Aya." Ken said flatly into the silence that followed.

And realized he was talking to himself.

Youji and Omi were staring at him. Not at Aya, at him. As if he were the one being terminally strange. As if it had been him, not Aya, who'd brought home a bleeding stranger and informed them that their Extra Credit assignment was to nurse them back to health. For a moment Ken could think of no response to their bewildering expressions – Youji's skeptical, Omi's frankly consternated – than to blink at them. Not, he admitted, the most intelligent of responses, but did he really need to be intelligent when Aya (and what the Hell, might as well include Youji and Omi too) was being so painfully dumb?

"Uh, guys," he said awkwardly, "there is a reason we don't drag total strangers home with us, you know…"  
"Is this really the time for that, Ken-kun?" Omi asked incredulously. "Can't you see she's _hurt_?"  
"Oh, it's a girl?" Ken said. Surprised. Maybe, he thought, that went some way to explaining why Aya had dragged her back. Maybe it had been some misguided notion of chivalry, but… nah, _chivalry_ didn't seem like Aya. Aya wouldn't have done something like that. Rescuing some unknown girl just because she was there was the kind of stupid stunt Youji might have pulled, but even Youji would have had the sense to leave this one to the professionals rather than deciding to play Private Nurse himself. Youji wouldn't have done it. Aya definitely wouldn't have done it. So why in the Hell _had_ he?

Not that anyone else seemed to have noticed the incongruity. Not when Omi seemed hell-bent on turning the basement into a makeshift emergency room and Youji was hovering by Aya's side and gazing down, like a concerned parent, at the face of the fragile girl in his teammate's arms. Was it just Ken's imagination or had the way Aya was holding her to his chest gotten just a shade possessive? What was going on here? Ken knew what was going on here, but what was going _on_ here?

"Wait." Ken said. "Wait. Guys? Omi? Hey, _Omi_! Omi, what the Hell's _wrong_ with you?"

Turning back to Ken, Omi hesitated at the foot of the stairs, the picture of concern. "Oh, Ken-kun," he said breathlessly, "I'm going to borrow some clothes from your closet for her, I don't know if mine'll— is something the matter?" He blinked, as if he had only now remembered that Ken was actually present, as if he hadn't actually acknowledged before now that Ken was shouting at him and that perhaps – the realization cutting through his sudden anxiety for the strange girl in Aya's arms; now where had that come from? – there was something preying on his friend's mind.

Finally. He'd been wondering if he'd stopped existing or something. Ken tried, not entirely successfully, to keep himself from scowling. Okay, he thought, they've all gone mad. He could tell he was going to have to keep this simple.

"Of course there's something the fucking matter! She can't stay _here_!"

And Omi actually gasped, his expression growing shocked. Even horrified. A bit of an overreaction, Ken thought, though he looked away almost in spite of himself. Met Aya's eyes more by accident than anything and only just managed not to cringe as the Patented Aya Fujimiya Thousand-Megawatt Leveling Gaze of Icy Death hit him head-on. Mary Mother of God, if looks could kill Persia would have been looking out for a new Siberian. Of course Youji was no help at all. Ken hardly knew why he'd expected he would be. Youji was never any bloody help, why would he have suddenly started now?

"But, Ken-kun, she needs treatment!" Omi cried, his eyes wide, as if he couldn't believe Ken could be so heartless.  
"What can we do a doctor can't?" Ken protested. "There is such a thing—"  
" _Leave it_ , Ken!" Youji, all his attention on the girl, his face full of anger and fear and solicitous concern. He hadn't even bothered looking round for more than a moment…  
"There is such a thing as a _hospital_!"

Omi ignored him, exchanging a weary glance with Aya and Youji, huddled attentively around the couch Aya had placed the wounded girl down upon, as if he couldn't believe Ken could prove so bloody-minded. Omi had always known Ken was stubborn but this was ridiculous. There was a time and a place for that kind of thing and this, he thought, was definitely not it. On the couch the girl moaned softly, and Omi spared Ken a withering glance (which Ken, of course. utterly failed to notice) before hurrying over to the couch, to join Aya and Youji in gazing down on the wounded girl, her face pale and tight with pain.

"We're _assassins_ ," Ken shouted at their turned backs, "not a fucking _Crash team_!"

And got the feeling he might as well have been shouting at the wall.

* * *

She stirred.

A single gentle sigh and she stirred, shifting uncomfortably as if trying to find a more comfortable way to lie. One little hand moved slightly beneath the sheets; her delicate features, previously relaxed in sleep, tightened as her brow furrowed and her full lips , her long, dark lashes fluttering slightly as she struggled to open her eyes. Omi caught his breath and exchanged a significant glance with Youji. Aya didn't move, didn't lift his eyes from her face.

Somewhere in the hinterland of their collective consciousness Ken sighed irritably, breaking the spell. Turning to shoot his friend an aggravated look from beneath his curls, Youji caught Ken just in time to see him quickly turning away, folding his arms and doing his utmost to look stubbornly unconcerned. Everything about him – his posture, the set of his jaw, the look in his eyes – betrayed a certain I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this resentment. Well, why not? It was only a statement of fact. Even, he thought, of the blindingly bleeding obvious.

"Just what is your problem, Ken?" Youji asked irritably. "We look after each other, don't we?"  
"Yeah, because we haven't got a fucking _choice_!" Ken retorted. His attempt to try and remain coolly indifferent to the girl – an attempt which he had to admit, even if only to himself, wasn't coming at all easily – had reached the point that he appeared to prefer talking to a standard lamp rather than turn round to face Youji and, with him, the house guest he didn't want to acknowledge. Honestly, Youji thought, he can be such a kid sometimes it's scary. " _I'm_ dead, _she_ isn't! There's no reason she couldn't have gone to a hospital—"  
"Quiet." Aya said, firmly and menacingly soft, in tone that brooked no compromise. He hadn't looked round. Still he watched the girl, rapt and anxious as a father over the cot of his ailing infant. If it hadn't been so utterly freaky it might almost have been humorous…  
" _Jesus_ ," Ken muttered under his breath.

(Not that He was listening either.)

The others ignored him and went back to gazing at the girl like a group of hypnotized owls. Ken determined to ignore them. He managed it for all of fifteen seconds until curiosity got the better of him and he hurried back over to the bed, peering over Youji's shoulder at the girl as she lay disgustingly picturesquely on the bed, her jet-black hair fanned out across the white sheets she lay on. She looked like a modern-day take on Sleeping Beauty, all shell-pink lips and porcelain complexion and charmingly tangled dark locks. Christ, Ken thought resentfully, she's so bloody _annoyingly_ perfect. Nobody slept like that, except in pictures.

(She couldn't be real, could she? Real people mussed up the sheets when they slept, and drooled on the pillows, and their mouths hung open and they only looked disgustingly cute if they were under eight or you thought they were disgustingly cute already. Real people _snored_.)

She seemed, almost, to wait. She seemed to choose her moment, waiting until she gauged she had their undivided attention. Then, only then, did she allow her lashes to flutter again, flutter and part, revealing sleepy, pain-filled violet eyes, impossibly wide in such a slender, pale face as they slowly focused on the faces crowding round her. She blinked, her soft pink lips parting slightly as she gasped softly, understatedly. Omi realized he had been holding his breath and quickly let himself breathe again before anyone else noticed only to realize, when he heard Youji's sudden sigh, that he hadn't been the only one. Even Aya looked tense. Ken, admittedly, had pulled a face and muttered something exasperated under his breath, but even he suspected he hardly counted at the moment.

"W… who are you?" She quavered, her voice a low, husky whisper. "Where… am I?"

Holy Mary Mother of God, Ken thought, she said it? "She _actually said_ —"

Aya quickly shot Ken a pointed glance which said plainly as shouting, if you say another word, Ken Hidaka, the rest of your life will be both exceedingly short and excruciatingly painful, before turning right back to the girl, his face all solicitous concern, though he frowned slightly when he realized the girl's eyes had alighted on Omi. Ken decided he was going to look out of the window instead. If what Aya really wanted was to go irretrievably nuts then who was Ken to try and stop him?

"Um…" Omi stammered, unnerved by the way the girl was watching him, and the fear he saw in her wide purple orbs, "Well, you're above a flower shop, actually. You were injured, so Aya-kun brought you back…" He hesitated as a shadowed look flitted into her eyes, and gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. "You don't have to be afraid, you're safe here. Do you remember what happened to you?"  
The girl looked up at him, her eyes confused. "I… no. No, not really." She said softly. "I—" She broke off, coughing. She even made coughing look beautifully poetic. You, Ken thought as he watched Aya gently helping her into a sitting position, supporting her body against his chest whilst Youji, not to be outdone, pushed her dark, tangled locks back from her forehead and held a glass of water to her lips, are _definitely not real_. He kept half expecting to see an On switch on her nape.  
"Are you all right?" Aya asked solicitously, attempting, not entirely successfully, to wave Youji away; the blonde still hovered, the half-empty glass of water clasped tightly in his hands and his gaze fixed upon the girl as Aya took his time about settling her back into bed. Maybe she was still thirsty.  
She swallowed, moistening her lips with the tip of her little pink tongue, then nodded. "I'm sorry," she murmured.  
"Don't worry!" Omi said overemphatically. "Please, don't worry! It's quite all—"  
"Who are you?" Ken asked suddenly.

The girl started, turning to In truth, she had barely noticed him before. Now she studied him from behind a fall of raven-dark hair. For a moment Ken fancied her gaze assessing, her expression calculating – and she smiled. She had a dizzying smile, the kind of smile a guy could get drunk on and Ken wondered if he hadn't been being kind of rash in taking against this girl after all. She was just so, so… he couldn't put it into words but she made Yuriko look like nothing…

"Rain." She said quietly. "They call me Rain."  
"Rain?" Ken echoed. An American name? She didn't look American. What the Hell kind of name is that, he wanted to say. "That's a nickname, right?" Why didn't I say _What the Hell kind of name is that_ , he wondered, only to wince at the look that crossed her face; that sudden strange shadowing crept back into her eyes. The smile dimmed, she quickly dropped her gaze and Ken stared, his own expression growing troubled. He should have known better than to ask her a thing like that… hang on, _why_ should he? "Okay, okay, sorry!" He said awkwardly. "So Rain, then… uh, I'm Ken by the way…"  
"Ken." She said as if trying the name out. "Okay then, Ken." And she smiled at him again and he caught himself thinking, wow, I need to apologize to the others.

… sure, something inside him pointed out, in an obstinately reasonable tone, but you liked Yuriko. She'd been solid and there and her hair got tangled when she had it up in her helmet and she didn't mind, and she'd got mad over stupid things and she'd weighed more than she looked and her body wasn't built on any model, it was just her body. She'd been a real girl, not some stupid bloody wind-up combination of a china doll and a genre painting. She'd just been Yuriko and that was what he'd liked about her…

And I, he thought, and did it firmly, do _not_ like this girl.

He watched distractedly as Youji, obviously deciding names were the key, quickly introduced himself and Omi and Aya to Rain in dizzying succession, fortunately stopping just short of telling her their shoe sizes and that they were all assassins. He watched as the girl aimed that heady smile at Youji, that smile that lit up her already beautiful face, and felt a pang of something rather like anger, and wondered why. Jealousy? What in the _Hell_ —? He didn't even know the woman. Wasn't Rain supposed to be sick or something? Why in the world was she reclining against her pillows, with Aya perched on the bed by her side, and smiling like she didn't have a care in the world? Yeah, she was beautiful when she was smiling, but… good Christ, why did it _matter_ what she looked like when she smiled? She shouldn't be here and that was the end of it!

He didn't know if it was intuition or one hundred percent natural craziness but Ken couldn't help thinking, there's something not quite right about this. There was something not quite right about Rain. Just being around her made him feel a little bit weird. A little bit crazy. A little bit totally unlike Ken.

If Rain wasn't about to get out, and it didn't look like she was, Ken guessed the next best thing was for him to.


	3. Scared of Girls

The timing was wrong. Retrospectively, Omi admitted it freely. The timing was so wrong it would have been hard to think of a less appropriate moment, domestically speaking anyway, for Omi to decide to share his little bit of good news. The problem was that Omi had been so eager to get it out and over with – he knew Ken wasn't going to like it; why spin it out? – that he hadn't been paying enough attention to what Ken (said information's sole recipient) was actually doing. He hadn't even been looking at him.

This, as it would turn out, was a mistake. The news had damn near finished Ken. Literally.

"Omi," Youji said wryly as he got to his feet, "promise me you'll never go into medicine."

And he stepped casually around the table to go and slap Ken quickly and forcefully between the shoulder blades, getting in four good blows before Ken, doubled over coughing, managed to elbow him away, quickly sitting upright in an unsuccessful bid to deter Youji from his mission of mercy. Omi sighed, exchanging glances with Aya. That, he thought sadly, could have stood to go a lot better…

"You do realize," Aya pointed out dryly after a further minute or so, "that the aim of slapping him on the back is to stop him choking to death, not to help the process along?"  
Youji straightened, smiling ingenuously, his demeanor all innocent bewilderment. "Aya, I'm just helping out here…"  
"Fuck _off_ , Kudou!" Ken managed hoarsely, glaring at Youji and hoping like Hell the fact his eyes were watering wouldn't be held against him. "It's _water_ , okay? I'm fine!" And tried, and tried desperately, to pretend he wasn't about to start coughing again. "What was that about Rain?"  
Omi swallowed. He smiled nervously. "Um… just that since she obviously can't go home, we thought it'd be nice if she stayed here. Just for a little while, until she finds her feet again…"

Well, at least he hadn't been halfway through trying to drink this time.

"You want her to _what_?" Ken demanded (though nowhere near as loudly or forcefully as he would have liked; had Omi done this deliberately?) for what must have been the ten thousandth time since Rain had abruptly walked, or rather been carried, into his life. He didn't quite know why he stood up, knocking the chair backward with an obnoxiously dramatic skitter, except that it seemed like the right thing to do. Christ, as if he hadn't been counting the days until they could get shot of the bloody girl!  
"Stay." Aya replied infuriatingly calmly. "Here. We can't throw her out onto the streets."  
Omi nodded earnestly. "It's not like she has anywhere else to go, Ken-kun…"  
"And," Youji said, with the manner of a man revealing the card to trump all trump cards, who'd just pulled an entire warren's worth of bunnies out of his tastefully elegant silk hat, "you can't deny it'll be nice to have a beautiful woman round the place."

Omi couldn't quite forbear to giggle. From the look on Ken's face, he could have done just that only too easily.

"She's got to have somewhere to go!" Ken said desperately. "She'll have come from somewhere, right? Why can't she go back there?"  
"That could be a bit, ah… _tricky_ , Kenken." Youji said, and though his words were flippant, his voice was all too grave. "You see, as far as we can work out, she was running away from something, or someone, when Aya here found her. If we send her back out there, there'd be nothing to stop whatever – or whoever – it was from hurting her again…"  
"Sorry, Youji," Ken said irreverently, "what was that? I couldn't hear you for the doom-filled violins. Stop it with the fucking theatrics for five minutes and be straight with me, okay? Haven't you actually _asked_ the goddamned woman?"  
Omi looked awkward. "We have tried, but she won't say."

He bit his lip anxiously, remembering the hunted look that had crept across Rain's face earlier that morning when he asked her, apropos of nothing at all, if there was anyone they could contact, anyone who would want to know that she was safe and well – no, she had said quietly, her beautiful amethyst eyes growing troubled, her smile becoming brittle, forced… false. Nobody. It had been all Omi could do, as he gazed upon the girl as she gazed out of the window of the spare room, the room Omi already thought of as hers, to keep himself from reaching out and resting one hand on her shoulder. You're not alone, Rain, he had wanted to say…

(And he had wondered when he left the girl's room – but vaguely, distantly – where thoughts like that came from. Strange. Being around Rain made him feel different, somehow.)

"I think," he added anxiously, "she's too afraid to."

Ken didn't reply. He'd been staying, as far as he could help it, out of Rain's way since that first afternoon; an easy enough task since all it involved was keeping well clear of the spare room. Admittedly, it had also meant volunteering for extra shifts in the shop and running every errand going and then some, but anything beat playing nursemaid to some girl he couldn't quite think straight round. He hadn't quite managed to avoid her altogether, though, and the more time he spent around her, the less he found to admire in her.

He didn't like those silences of hers. The horribly dramatic way her face would cloud when he mentioned something that didn't want to talk of and which had, in the first day or so, provoked feelings of sudden and terrible remorse – as if he should have known before times what a near-stranger didn't want mentioned! – were becoming only irritating. Not least of which because they happened _all the damn time_. Pretty much every time he tried to talk to the bloody woman he'd touch on something that would have her eyes becoming suddenly shadowed, her gaze distant…

He didn't like the way she looked at him, either. Funny thing was, Ken found he couldn't recall what he didn't like about it.

"You didn't see what we saw when we were cleaning her up, Ken-kun," Omi was saying, his expression painfully earnest, his eyes pleading as a puppy's. "There were older injuries there… scars… she's been badly hurt before, and recently. Wherever she's come from, we obviously can't send her back there under those circumstances, and we can't throw her out. She's got to stay here."  
"She can't stay here." Ken said forcefully, ignoring the way Omi gasped and the juvenile Icy Death Glare that was Aya's sudden glower. Youji just raised his eyes heavenward and sighed. It was almost more unsettling.  
"Why on Earth not?" Aya asked dangerously.  
"Because I don't like it, that's why!" Ken shouted, slamming his hands forcefully down onto the table, making the plates and cups bearing the remnants of their abortive evening meal clatter and jump. Pointless, but it made him feel fractionally better for a fraction of a second. "What the Hell's wrong with you three at the moment? There's something very, _very_ weird about that woman! She _can't_ be for real! And what about our fucking cover!"  
"Temper, temper." Youji said far too smoothly, through a smile Ken thought grounds for justifiable homicide. Youji didn't know how lucky he was Ken didn't have his bugnuks anywhere to hand; how the guy stood the temptation that was having that damned watch on his wrist all the damned time Ken thought he would never know. "What _about_ our fucking cover?"  
"Oh, nothing, really," Ken retorted, ignoring the tease, "just that I happen to like it where it is!"  
"Stop acting like a child, Hidaka." Aya said briskly; his violet eyes, shining out from beneath his tumbled crimson fringe, were angry. "That won't be a problem. Rain is staying."  
"For Christ's sakes, Aya! Can't you _see_ it's not goddamned safe—"

Aya wasn't listening. Aya had already got to his feet, turned his back and started stalking out, with Omi – and even he looked exasperated – following. Clearly the discussion, as far as he was concerned, was over. Ken watched them go, scowling at their turned backs (Good Christ, didn't Fujimiya realize his word wasn't goddamned law? Of course, Ken reflected, this would have been a rather more useful line of argument if Omi, whose word _was_ law, a quiet, polite kind of law a body didn't even consider transgressing if he had the slightest fondness for breathing, hadn't been marching in step with the guy) then, sighing, walked back over to the table and started collecting up the dinner plates. Youji gave him a funny look as he left, a look Ken scrupulously pretended not to notice.

"You're not the boss here, Fujimiya," Ken pointed out to the dinner service. "You're just fucking _bossy_."

* * *

When Aya dropped the next bombshell over breakfast three days later, Ken wondered if perhaps he shouldn't give up food for the duration.

That morning had found Ken setting Rain a place at the breakfast table and muttering a discontented something about why stupid goddamn girls couldn't just live their own goddamn lives and not crash other people's when it was obvious they weren't goddamn wanted and equally stupid goddamn tables with only four goddamn sides. He wasn't used to cooking for five and he resented it, especially when all the recipes he knew were for four, the cookbook worked in fours and so did the goddamned groceries. Well, that or sixes. He needed five and everything was out of whack. He resented having to have fun with math just to get dinner out the way. Hell, he resented having to be the one to do it in the first place. Christ, for _this_ he had skipped going running.

(That was another thing, since when had they started doing breakfast? And since when had Youji willingly dragged himself out of his pit before midday? If Rain was moving in, couldn't they just be normal round her? Why in the Hell did Aya want them all treating her like a goddamned house guest?)

It wasn't like the meals themselves were much fun either. Screw liking cookery, he thought, poking moodily at the rice he suddenly didn't feel like eating. They were going back to the damned rota until Rain got her ass out the door and Little Miss Angsty-and-Mysterious (yeah, like _that_ was so uncommon around here!) was going to take her turn like everyone else, now she'd quite literally got her feet under the table. It took all Ken's self-control to resist the urge to kick her.

He had no idea why the others were being so weird about it, though. He never had liked newcomers much and Aya and Youji had the bruises to prove it. Why should he suddenly come over all sweetness and light just because Aya bloody Fujimiya (who he still wasn't liking much, actually) had taken it upon himself to import a female and dote on her?

Oh well, at least the others hadn't insisted the girl join Weiss. Though even _that_ was probably coming…

"Shopping?" Ken said incredulously.

And Omi and Youji traded yet another glance. That had to be, what, about the thousandth since Rain had gotten here? Ken had come to think of it as their Don't-Mind-Ken Glance, and he had already been given ample opportunity to become heartily sick of it. You, that glance said, are being exceptionally exasperating and equally perverse so we have both decided to ignore you until you stop shouting and start making a bit more sense. Never mind that as far as he was concerned they were the crazy bastards who weren't making sense.

"Aya, you're _seriously_ suggesting we take her _shopping_ on Kr—" Youji, or at least Ken assumed it was Youji, kicked him under the table and he quickly changed tack, "someone else's goddamned _credit card_?"

Persia is gonna have a fit, he wanted to add, but prudence suggested now might not be the time. But that card was for mission-related expenses, or for buying detonators and extra razor wire and bullets for the gun Aya kept in his coat and thought Ken didn't know he had. Stuff like that. It was not for buying women's underwear! Never mind that he didn't know what the guy looked like in anything but the vaguest terms (big mother; got a beard) Ken found he could imagine perfectly the look on Persia's face if Omi put in an expense claim for two dozen pairs of bras and panties. Right down to the beads of sweat and the throbbing vein at the temple. Oh, God, never mind Persia, if _Manx_ saw something like this…

"Aya," he said firmly, "you use that card to buy girls' clothes with and Erika's gonna have a stroke."  
Rain blinked. "Erika? Aya, who's that?"  
"Someone who's not gonna like us buying clothes on a business credit card." Ken replied.  
"She does our expenses." Aya explained far too calmly, accompanying his words with another And-Don't-Say-A-Bloody-Word-Hidaka glare. "I'm sure she'll understand, Ken." He made it sound as if the possibility that she wouldn't was so remote it didn't even exist. They were thinking about the same Erika here, right? _Manx_ Erika?  
Rain looked doubtful, giving Ken a strange look out of the corners of her impossibly purple eyes. "Are you sure she won't mind if you buy me new clothes on that?"  
"We'll square it with her, Rain-san." Omi said, smiling sweetly at the girl. "Don't worry."

Maybe, Ken thought, if he staged a trip while clearing the table he could get away with dropping natto down her front. Maybe not, though; for now, the girl was wearing one of his few formal shirts and a pair of knee-length khaki shorts Ken recognized as coming from Omi's wardrobe, her long, wavy hair pulled back in a high ponytail with a few loose strands framing her heart-shaped face, and looking so irritatingly effortlessly lovely that Omi had declared she could keep the shorts seeing how much better they looked on her.

Ken wanted his shirt back, preferably yesterday. Not that he was planning on wearing it, it was the principle of the thing. It was _his_ shirt, God damn it.

Honestly though, shopping? Abandoning the store on a Saturday, one of the busiest days of the week, just so they could go watch Rain trying on jeans and carry her damned bags home for her? Clearly Rain thought it was a great way to spend the day, but Ken sure didn't. Tokyo on _Saturday afternoon_ – if the _Koneko_ was anything to go by it was going to be a foretaste of Hell even without adding Rain. It wasn't until after the girl had headed back upstairs, and Ken was trying to bully Youji into admitting that yes, it was about time he did something about the house for once and that he could make a start on it by doing the washing-up now, that Youji dropped the next bombshell.

"If it's the money that's bothering you, Kenken," Youji said in a far-too-casual tone that had Ken immediately on his guard; the money wasn't the half of it and Youji knew it just as well as he did, "don't sweat it. Rain'll be working in the shop with us as of next week, so she'll be able to— what's the problem now, kid?"

Ken had started hunting through one of the kitchen drawers. When he straightened and turned back to Youji, he was holding a large kitchen knife casually between forefinger and thumb. The blade glinted slightly in the light as Ken far-too-casually threw it upright. Then he smiled. It wouldn't have been a reassuring sight from anyone, not just an impulsive assassin with marked aggressive tendencies… never mind one with a (admittedly somewhat unfair) reputation for erring on the clumsy side. Come on, he was a goalkeeper, Youji reminded himself. He spent years catching stuff. He's not about to stab himself.

Not, of course, that Ken stabbing himself was his primary concern.

"Christ, Ken," Youji said tightly, "Didn't your mother tell you not to play with knives? What's this in aid of?"  
"Shall I kill myself here," Ken asked brightly, "or would you rather I waited until I got back upstairs?"

* * *

"So," Rain said curiously, "where's this mall you're taking me to?"

Rain might have been forgiven for thinking she'd asked her companions to work out the root of pi, or who had said 'Now is the winter of our discontent'. She might, in fact, have got a rather prompter answer if she had. As it was, she received no response, unless Aya's eyes flickering, momentarily, from the bumper of the car in front of his (the road, of course, well and truly cluttered with all the typical Saturday-morning traffic – he'd known they should have taken the train and would have done had he not suspected that trying to get Rain's new wardrobe back home would be like struggling with an army requisition even with the help of four guys and two cars) could be counted as a response.

She winced when Ken laughed briefly and incredulously, her eyes darkening briefly as she frowned. The young girl hadn't missed the way Ken had tried his utmost to avoid her since she'd woken up, or the way he alone out of her four rescuers had taken an obvious dislike to her… Omi had been nothing but kindness to her during her recovery and she had quickly found herself warming to the sweet, innocent boy; Youji, though she couldn't believe the man thought she was the kind of girl who could actually fall for those cheesy lines of his, seemed nice enough. And Aya – well, Aya had, after the first day, been aloof almost to the point of rudeness, but she could tell there was something else there, that he had a reason for keeping his distance from her.

So what made Ken so different? Why, if the others were falling all over themselves trying to be nice to her in their fashion, was that one the odd man out? What did he have against her that made him act so hostilely?

" _Mall_?" Ken asked, staring hard at the back of Rain's head.  
Omi blinked, exchanged a glance with Ken (who was so surprised Omi was choosing to trade glances with him for once that he damn near fell off his seat) and leant forward, peering at the girl's trim profile through the gap between the seats. "You want to go to a mall, Rain-san?" He asked.  
"Well, if we're going shopping…" The girl said a trifle defensively, only to be interrupted by Ken.  
"A shopping mall? You want to go to a shopping mall when there's an entire freakin' _city_ out there? That's _stupid_ —"  
"Ken-kun, please." Now Omi interrupted Ken, his frown an obvious reproach. Could you at least _try_ to be pleasant? "Um, Rain-san? We could take you to a mall if you liked, but it would mean going out of the city… Ken-kun's right, it would be a bit strange to go to a shopping center when we're so close to the city."  
"Really? Don't you guys _go_ to malls?"  
"No, not really," Ken replied straightforwardly. "People who live in big cities don't exactly need to."

Rain couldn't say she'd really thought about it that way before. She guessed it did make rather more sense… "I guess I'm just not used to living here yet," She offered with an apologetic smile.

It still seemed strange to wake up knowing that this strange city, this _Tokyo_ , was her home now… and, before she had run into the arms of these four young men, she hadn't ever been given the opportunity to find her feet here. Hadn't ever, really, been allowed to acclimatize herself to her new home. It hadn't mattered to _them_ that she hadn't known where she was, and was too disoriented to remember the Japanese her mother had taught her; _they_ had delighted in her confusion and in keeping her an outsider, an unknown quantity… just for a moment her eyes grew troubled, and she felt a little homesick. A little afraid.

"Rain-san?" Omi said in consternation, "are you all right?"  
Rain started, flinching. "Ah! Oh, yes… fine, fine! I was just thinking about— oh, nothing, really." She smiled at the anxious boy, expertly changing the subject. "So, um, if we're going to the shops, where will you be taking me? I never used to like really conventional things, so…" Her smile dimmed slightly at the lie. It had been seldom she'd received new clothes and never allowed to choose them, but she'd often imagined how she would dress once she had the freedom to do as she chose… but now, she supposed, she could wear whatever she liked. She could reinvent herself, become the person she'd always dreamed of being… "I always used to like Hot Topic, so…"

She broke off. Aya's eyes had flickered across to her face again, and this time he frowned.

" _Hot Topic_?" Ken and Omi said in near-perfect unison, Ken tripping slightly over the English and topping it with, "what's that?"  
"Something you'd see on a forum?" Omi volunteered.  
"Forum?"  
"On the internet, Ken-kun."  
"Oh, right. Well," Ken said thoughtfully, " _that_ can't be right…"  
"You don't have them?" Rain asked, and she looked disappointed. "Um, so if you wanted to wear something different, where would you go to buy it?"

Omi glanced about himself at his companions – at Aya, a vision in basic black, then at Ken whose tee-shirt, at a conservative estimate, was at least two sizes too large – and then down at his slightly scuffed trainers. Youji might have been rather more help, but Youji was about three cars behind them and in such an obvious (though highly circumspect) sulk at Rain passing up a ride in Seven in favor of Aya's Porsche that even Ken hadn't felt up to catching a lift with him.

"Um, well…" Omi began hesitantly, "we probably aren't the ones to ask, Rain-san."

* * *

Saturday. The stores, as ever, crowded with extras there to buy or browse, with crowds of gossiping girls, with young women and their bored or hostile or overbearingly solicitous escorts, with families bickering lightly over this and that. And here or there, a weary weekend father uncomfortable in his leisure clothes, his eyes both awkward and furtive as if he couldn't quite work out how he'd gotten here in the first place and wishing he were back in the safety of his office.

And on this particular Saturday there was Ken Hidaka, caught between two overburdened racks of black mini-skirts and looking horribly lost there.

This felt like the five millionth crowded clothing store he'd been in since they'd arrived at the shops and the four of them were already overburdened with bags full of clothes and art supplies and CDs and various other things Rain had seen and taken a fancy to and Aya had made Kritiker buy for her. Rain already owned more clothes and accessories than Ken did and they hadn't even stopped for lunch yet. Manx, Ken thought, was going to blow a blood vessel. She'd take one look at the statement when it came in and stroke out on the spot. He understood perfectly and would hardly have blamed her.

(Thankfully, Rain had been too wrapped up in debating the various demerits of two practically identical pairs of black ankle boots to overhear the whispered conversation – well, argument really – between Aya and Ken about credit card bills, budget cuts and the availability or otherwise of second-hand crossbow bolts.)

Right now, Rain was modeling a black top with an elaborate red Chinese dragon screen-printed onto its front and a black asymmetrically cut mini-skirt which fastened with a belt at one side while Omi, encircled by carrier bags, looked admiringly on. Even Aya seemed to be having difficulty keeping his eyes to himself. Youji just looked bored and was whiling away the time in desultorily hitting on one of the equally bored shop girls, but that meant nothing because Youji was waiting in breathless anticipation for them to hit the underwear shops and saw an ordinary clothing store as just another delay.

Ken wasn't at all sure who he'd rather kill – Rain, Youji, or himself, he'd done quite enough already that he really didn't think offing himself was going to make the slightest bit of difference any more – and wasn't sure whether he should thank God he'd left his bugnuks at home, or curse the guy likewise for allowing him to forget them.

"Do you guys think this suits me?" Rain asked after a while, turning to the four of them.  
"Suits you?" Omi asked in surprise.  
Ran nodded. "I mean, I like it, but it's a bit low-cut… the top, I mean. You don't think it's too revealing for someone like me?"  
Omi flushed awkwardly and glanced over to Youji for help, but he was exchanging name cards with the shop girl and didn't notice. Ken pulled a face. "I dunno," he said uninterestedly.  
Omi gave him a Look. "It looks nice, " he volunteered. "If you like it, Rain-san, you should get it."  
"You think?" Rain said uncertainly. "I never… I mean, I wasn't sure I could wear things like this…"

Great, Ken thought, all this and she's fishing for compliments. Look, God, I'm a sinner. Mortal, venal, you name it I do it, I kill for money and I'm the world's leading expert on Youji Kudou's back, and certain parts lower down. However You want to cut it I'm guilty. So, if You've any spare thunderbolts up there and You're feeling at all Old Testament and in the mood for a random smiting, lay it on me. Just as long as I don't have to watch bloody _Rain_ play _Pretty Princess Dress-Me-Up_ all day.

"It looks great." Omi assured her with a bright smile. "If you're happy with it, that's all that matters."  
"Well… okay!" Rain smiled back at him and turned back into the changing rooms, closing the curtains behind her with an unnecessary flourish.  
"Please tell me that was the last damned outfit she's got in there," Ken said.

When the curtains opened again Rain was once again dressed in the black hooded sweater, stone-washed blue jeans and black lace-up basketball boots she had bought at the first store they visited, handing Aya the new outfit as she stepped back over to them. Aya nodded at her, his expression softening slightly, as he took them from her then headed to the tills, Omi trailing behind him. Guy hadn't even _glanced_ at the price tags… Oh well, it could be worse. At least Ken had his shirt back and wearing the damned thing round his waist for the rest of the afternoon was, he thought, a small price to pay to see it stayed that way.

Rain watched them go, smiling, but her smile faded as they moved away. She was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable and she soon realized why. Her trained instincts told her that she was being watched. Turning around, instantly on her guard and tensing herself to spring into an attack, Rain found herself confronted with three rather sluttily-dressed girls of about her own age, all three of them staring daggers at her. She only just managed to stop herself from bursting out laughing.

"Can I help you?" She asked, her voice filled with amusement.  
"You're here with Omi-san, right?" the tallest of the three said, taking a step forward.  
Rain nodded in agreement. "Yes, I'm living with him." She said offhandedly, and grinned at the horror-struck look that passed across the faces of the three girls. "His friends took me in."  
"You're _living_ with him?" The slutty girl said in amazement. "Don't tell me you're his girlfriend. If you're messing with him, you'll regret it!"

Rain just watched her for a moment or two, her arms folded and her violet eyes slightly narrowed in amusement and a smile curling the corners of her full, shell-pink lips. These little girls might not have known it, but they had picked the worst possible person to pick a fight with. Fighting was in Rain's blood and the lovely brunette never backed down from a challenge. As she watched, the slutty girl's friends exchanged anxious glances then melted into the background. This new girl was a lot taller and stronger than their leader. If she was planning to fight her, she was on her own!

"I'm not Omi's girlfriend, actually." Rain replied sweetly. "But I certainly wouldn't need _your_ permission if I wanted to be."

And she turned gracefully on her heel, her dark curls swirling about her, then walked away with her head held high, leaving the girls dumbstruck. She smiled to herself as she browsed quickly through a rack of shirts, blithely unconcerned about the dark looks the girl shot her as her two friends hurried her out of the store.

Ken didn't think he'd ever seen a more nauseating display in his life.

"When you've quite finished being Queen Bitch," he said irritably, "can you get on with it so we can go, _please_?"  
"Queen _Bitch_?" Rain asked incredulously. Her eyes darkened with anger as she glared at the boy. "How dare you speak to me like that!"  
"What else would you call coming over all high and mighty with those girls just because you've crashed Omi's life?"  
"I didn't 'crash anyone's life', Aya took me in." Rain retorted coldly. "I didn't force him to, nor did I order him to let me stay. Just because you don't want me around doesn't mean your friends don't. And don't you think that makes me an object of pity! I don't want your pity!"  
Ken bridled. "Christ! It's not about you! Didn't it even _occur_ to you what you—"  
"I haven't finished yet," the girl snapped; Ken fell resentfully silent more from surprise than any real desire to hear her out, glaring at her from beneath his fringe. "You know I can't go back where I came from. Do you really think I'd _ever_ impose myself on anybody if I knew I wasn't wanted? Do you think I'd ever have agreed to let Aya take me in if I had anywhere else to go, anywhere at all? You don't know me, Ken Hidaka," Rain hissed furiously, her lilac eyes flashing her defiance. "How dare you? How _dare_ you believe you understand me on the basis of the little you've seen? You never even gave me a chance! You know nothing about me or my past, you don't understand what I've been through to make me the person I am, so don't you dare assume you can condemn me!"  
Ken laughed. He couldn't help himself. "The Hell was _that_ all about, Rain?" He asked incredulously. "You don't exactly know where I'm at either!"

Rain said nothing. She merely glared at Ken for a long moment, her narrowed orbs blazing with angry amethyst fire and her lovely features scored with the unmistakable marks of her righteous fury. Even when she was angry she looked disarmingly beautiful. Then she backhanded him across the cheek, hard, and stalked away to join Aya and Omi by the checkouts, her pale face full of cold disdain.

Counterproductive to say the least. All it did was leave Ken, absently rubbing at his damaged cheek, wondering quite why Rain assumed that ranting about how misunderstood she was then smacking him round the face would rid him of the idea that she was an annoying bitch.

"Hate to say it, Kenken," Youji said from somewhere him, "but you had that coming."


	4. Lady of the Flowers

"… I know you don't like her but that's no reason not to be civil to her."  
"Why isn't it? She hit me."  
"You hit me and I still talk to you."  
"That's _different_!"  
"No it isn't. And I'm not surprised. You called her a bitch and that's no way to treat a lady, Kenken."  
"She is a bitch and don't call me that."  
"Shit. No wonder you still haven't gotten yourself a girlfriend…"  
" _What_? She bloody is!"

Youji simply smiled wearily at him, in a way that told Ken his teammate thought he was both exceptionally exasperating and so obviously in the wrong it wasn't even worth arguing the point any more, and wandered off in the general direction of the shop floor, all his attention on Rain, hovering by the counter holding a lilac apron in both hands, as if she wasn't quite sure how it had got there. Well, Ken thought, that made two of them.

Youji, of course, wouldn't have been Youji if he hadn't gently taken the apron from the girl and helped her on with it, tugging her long, straight hair free from the straps and fussing over the way it hung about the girl's neck and waist to a degree even he would have freely and cheerfully admitted excessive. Ken, for his part, was left wondering on exactly what grounds one could claim to have committed _justifiable_ homicide. More to the point, he was beginning to suspect Youji was wasting his time. They'd all seen the way Rain looked at Aya. They'd all seen the way the redhead's normally grim countenance softened slightly but perceptibly when his gaze alighted on the trim figure of the girl.

If Rain liked Aya, Ken had to wonder why in the Hell she was encouraging Youji. It wasn't _right_ to lead the guy on like that, dammit, he'd been hurt enough by the women in his life without this girl showing up with her self-indulgent secret sorrows, her selfish belief that she was the only one who understood what it was to be alone and misunderstood, and making matters worse…

She did not, Ken thought, deserve any of them. She sure as _shit_ didn't deserve Youji.

"When you've quite finished staring into space, Hidaka."  
" _Sorry_ , Aya."

It didn't take long for Ken at least to call Rain's presence in the store as a hindrance, and a serious one at that. He could tell from the way some of the girls who haunted the place were watching her as she floated far too serenely about the shop playing at floristry. It was obvious that her presence wasn't exactly what one would have called popular with the clientele.

The crowd of college girls who usually flocked about Youji glowered as the willowy blonde, bent over the table showing the newcomer how to fill out a delivery request, casually rested one arm across Rain's shoulders; Sakura, along with the rest of Aya's admirers, bristled at the way his eyes softened when he spoke to Rain; the perky girls who gravitated toward Omi murmured to one another in atypical restraint when the boy far-too-eagerly fetched Rain four long-stemmed pink roses for the arrangement she was deftly assembling. Shit, Ken thought, you mean she's gonna be bad for business too?

"Who's she?"  
"I've never seen her before. I didn't know they were hiring!"  
"Is she really going to be working here?"  
"D… did Aya-san just _smile_ at her?"  
"No way! He can't have! You're imagining it, Sakura!"  
"Who does she think she is?"

"Aya-san," Rain said ingenuously, "why do all these girls come here if they're not going to buy anything? It seems silly if you ask me."

Aya looked up at her in surprise and Rain smiled shyly at him, peering out at him from behind her fringe. These girls, she thought – giggling and chattering like this, and hovering round the four young men as if they'd never seen an attractive guy in their lives – really must drive these four to near distraction. Honestly. It was really pretty pathetic if you asked her. It wasn't like any of them were going to get anything out of it… well, maybe from Youji they would, but even then she was sure it wouldn't be anything lasting. As for the others, as for _Aya_ —

"Bet you wouldn't mind if they were boys," Ken said irritably, and accidentally won himself four new admirers. Youji, back in his usual corner, but watching Rain from over the sunglasses that had slipped halfway down his nose, smiled wryly. "Kenken," he said absently, "at least _try_ , okay?"

All that aside, though, there were reasons, and damned good reasons at that, why the _Koneko no Sumu Ie_ did not hire extra staff. What the Hell were they going to tell her about Manx, and the way they'd all vanish off when she arrived? It'd only have to happen twice for Rain to pick up on it as something weird. Three times and she'd be asking awkward questions. Wasn't it obvious that the girl was a walking time bomb? And he hadn't wanted her there in the first place… Ken was damn sure that, when Rain did blow up in their faces, he was not going to be the one to pick up the pieces. This wasn't his idea, goddamnit!

Oh well, Ken thought, shopkeeper's code: when in doubt, smile like an idiot…

That was Sunday.

* * *

Monday morning brought with it Rain's announcement that, as of today, she would be attending school with Omi. The announcement was met with no surprise at all from Aya, though Youji aimed a supposedly playful glower with way too much sincerity behind it at his blonde teammate. Ken just looked sour but that, at least, wasn't to be accounted particularly surprising. Ken seemed to be spending ever-increasing amounts of time trying to look exceedingly hard done by, looks his teammates, for the most part, contrived to ignore.

"Jesus," Ken muttered to nobody in particular, "what's she going to be doing as an encore?"  
Youji gave him a narrow look. "Don't be stupid, Hidaka."  
"Oh, yeah? You wait! Five thousand yen says she's in by Friday!"  
"You mean that?" Youji asked. "Because I'll be holding you to it, Kenken."  
"Bet ya." Ken said challengingly.

Omi ignored them. He was far too busy looking indecently happy about the idea of spending all day in the company of the beautiful teenager, and he was positively beaming at Rain as he led her through the crowded shop and toward the door – though Ken could hardly help but note the schoolgirl quotient seemed to be dropping. News like Rain, he guessed, spread fast. Also, he appeared to be attracting rather more attention than usual – news like his utter lack of interest in Rain must have spread fast too. Take those twin sisters who usually hung about Youji; they'd been staring at him and when he asked if they were looking for anything they'd blushed and giggled and elbowed one another. God, girls were weird.

Speaking of Rain… Ken glanced dubiously over at the girl. Something wasn't right here. Make that something else wasn't.

The girl was stood by the table next to Omi handing him, in the face of jealous stares from a good half-dozen of the watching girls, a fabric-wrapped box. Long acquaintance with his older sisters' stupid true-love manga told Ken that box no doubt contained some cutely elaborate packed lunch. Probably involved heart-shaped _maki_ rolls. No doubt she'd given Omi's fan club the same idea and tomorrow the poor kid would barely be able to get out the door for girls thrusting bento boxes at him – but that wasn't what was weird.

Rain was dressed in an Imperial purple sleeveless V-neck sweater over a white blouse with short, puffed sleeves edged in the same imperial purple and a purple stripe on the collar, a gray-violet pleated mini-skirt and white loose socks. A light violet bow had been tied about her neck, matching the bow holding back her rebellious raven curls, and on her feet she wore black loafers. Ken had a blue apron on and his hair needed cutting and he really didn't think he got it.

"What are you wearing?" "Oh, this?" Rain asked, gesturing to her outfit. "It's my old school uniform. I don't have the proper one yet."  
"Oh of course it's your old school uniform how silly of me. _Omi_ ," Ken said tightly, "can I talk to you for a minute? In private?"

And, without waiting for the teenager to reply, he grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and dragged him off into one of the back rooms, leaving Rain blinking and stranded in the middle of the shop floor. Not that she looked forlorn for long, mind; Youji immediately rushed to her side to transfuse her, leaving Aya to glower at him through the fronds of the comically outsize bamboo plant they hadn't quite managed to sell off yet. The exasperated look on the girl's beautiful face as Youji approached, and the bright smile she had granted him when she realized he was watching her, mollified the redhead a little.

Ken glared at her from the stockroom door for a moment or two before turning his attention back to Omi, who was trying to pry his hand from his collar.

"What's this in aid of, Ken-kun?" Omi asked, barely managing to restrain his temper, all the while hoping Ken would get to the point and let him go. He didn't want to have to lose his temper with Ken just in case the older boy didn't actually notice it. Omi didn't do 'angry' well; he normally just ended up looking cute. "We're going to be late…"  
"Remind me again what the girls' uniform at your school looks like."  
"Ken-kun, does this have—"  
"Indulge me, okay? Or you could always imagine that if you don't tell me I don't let go of your shirt."  
Omi sighed. Oh, dear. Looked like he'd fallen foul of what Youji always referred to as Ken's Stubborn Bastard streak. "Yellow sweater. White shirt. Blue skirt. Can I go now _please_."  
"One more thing." Ken said, and now his expression was about two parts confusion to one part resentment. "If the girls at your school wear yellow and blue, then why in the holy motherfuck is Rain wearing purple?"  
Omi shook his head. He might even have laughed. "Ken-kun, she already told you that's her old uniform."  
"Her old uniform." Ken echoed flatly, letting go of Omi's collar. "So she's sticking to that story, is she?"  
" _Story_ , Ken-kun?"  
"Omi, she doesn't _have_ an old school that we know about!" Ken protested. "We spent all Saturday buying her crap because she didn't have anything of her own and Manx is going to goddamn well kill us for it, remember? Now all of a sudden she's wearing an old school uniform? Bullshit! Something doesn't add up here and I don't like it!"

For a moment Omi said nothing in response. He simply gave Ken what could only have been described as an old-fashioned look, all narrowed eyes and quiet censure. It didn't make him look any less worryingly cute, but something told him Ken understood well enough that he was angry with him. Ken looked away, suddenly uncomfortable. Obviously thinking Rain was anything other than a sweet, innocent little bundle of a creature who deserved nothing but love, approbation and protection was rather infra dig of him.

"There's no need to be like that, Ken-kun." Omi said far too calmly. "I understand you're suspicious, but can't the fact the rest of us are quite happy to trust Rain be good enough for you?"  
"It _feels_ wrong." Ken said stubbornly, and even as he said it he realized how lame he had to sound.  
"The rest of us," Omi pointed out again, his voice still alarmingly calm, "are quite happy to trust her."  
And all that meant to Ken's mind, was that he had three idiot teammates rather than one. "And you're obviously right because there are three of you," he said sarcastically. He felt like any minute he could turn decidedly _nasty_. "Come on, Omi, I know you're smarter than that!"  
"Maybe," Omi suggested somewhat pointedly, "I'd be smart enough for your liking if you'd let me get to class."

Whoops. Looked like Omi had reached the end of his surprisingly lengthy tether. Ken grinned anxiously, letting go of Omi's collar and raising his hands as if to show he had no designs on holding him back – or maybe it was defensively? It wasn't always easy to tell when dealing with teenage assassins, even those as fundamentally even-tempered as Omi. That he'd managed to piss Omi off anyway told Ken he really needed to watch out round the others if he wasn't going to end up getting up close and personal with the business end of Aya's katana. The guy had no life whatsoever aside from waving his goddamn sword about the place and screaming _die_ at the top of his lungs…

Straightening his collar, Omi muttered something Ken was damned grateful to only half-catch before hurrying back out to the shop. Ken, deciding discretion was ever the better part, decided it would be best to stay in the stockroom until the others had left the store, and spend the day coming up with some combination of convincing excuse and heartfelt apology. Not that it would make having to watch Rain smiling coyly up at any or all of his teammates from behind a waterfall of raven curls any—

 _Wait_ aminute. Waterfall of raven curls _whatthefuck_.

"Omi!" Ken yelled at the teenager's retreating back, "Hey, Omi! Her hair was _straight_ yesterday! _And_ she had a fringe!"

Omi simply sighed and wearily shook his head, exchanging a smile and a pointed glance with Rain as they stepped out into the street. He was hardly surprised to discover that Rain was stifling a giggle. Honestly, what was wrong with Ken at the moment? Everyone knew Rain's hair had always been curly.

"I'm sorry about that, Rain-san. Ken-kun's never been very good with newcomers."  
Rain blinked, as if that interpretation for Ken's behavior toward her hadn't even occurred to her. "Really? I thought… I thought perhaps it was just me…" Her voice tailed off and her gaze dropped slightly as she spoke, her eyes becoming, momentarily, distant.  
"Personal? No, I really don't think it's that. Actually," Omi said, feeling himself start to smile, "for him this is really pretty good. When Aya-kun first started working with us, Ken-kun had punched him before he told him his name. I'm sure he'll be fine just as soon as he's got used to you…"

Omi tailed off, realizing that Rain wasn't smiling. Wasn't, in fact, even looking at him. She had stopped walking and now merely gazed at the street, her head down and her troubled lilac eyes affixed to the cracks in the paving. Obviously this wasn't just about Ken and the way he was treating her. Perhaps it didn't have anything to do with Ken… he felt an almost overwhelming rush of sympathy for this strange young girl. What must it have been like, he wondered, to be so beautiful., yet so scarred? Whatever could have _happened_ to this poor young woman to trouble her so?

Omi couldn't help himself. He hurried back to the young girl and rested his hands gently on her shoulders, smiling warmly as Rain raised her head and gazed up at him in surprise and God, Omi thought with a horrible pang, the haunted look in those dizzying amethyst orbs…

"Rain-san?" Omi asked tentatively, "what's the matter? Please, if there's anything troubling you, you can always tell us…"  
"N… no," the girl stammered, an unconvincing smile playing across her shell-pink lips, "it's nothing like that. Nothing's the matter. Please, don't worry about it. Omi-san, we're going to be late…"

And she hurried off, leaving Omi to gaze after her in consternation, a frown playing across his lips and a new resolution creeping into his soul. They would have to get Rain to open out to them, no matter how long it took. There had to be some way they could ease her troubles, some way they could find the person who had so harmed her – but before they could even begin to help Rain, the girl would have to feel she could trust them. With Rain revealing herself as so troubled, so obviously damaged, and with the comfortable lies they had told her about their own harmlessness, Omi could already tell that gaining her trust was going to be no easy task…

But first he was going to have to have another word with Ken.

* * *

Every so often, events would conspire to leave Ken wondering if maybe he'd been better off staying dead after all. Ending up at the wrong end of a .45, for example. Or trying to stare down the kind of kitty cat no sane guy would feel like cuddling armed with a weapon that was well and truly useless on any target stood over an arm's length away. Or the alarming tendency for random detonation half the buildings he ended up in seemed to fall prey to as if he hadn't already heard enough from fire to last him a lifetime and didn't have the horrible disfiguring scars to prove it. Things like that.

And, of course, there was Manx with That Look on her face.

All it would have needed was a wimple and she could have been a nun. Easily. The high heels, the mini-skirts, the head of raging red curls and the positively lethal way with lipstick were all nothing but a front. Put That Look on her face and she wasn't Manx, she was Sister Helena of the Assumption and she was _absolutely terrifying_.

Youji, of course, was more interested in the legs and the cleavage. Ken would have been grateful for it, would have been glad to see that Youji's playful flirtations with Manx had survived Rain's advent intact when they meant a bit of a break from the young man hovering round the pale brunette as if she were some sublime honeypot and he a love-struck bee, if it hadn't been for That Look. Youji, though, seemed not to have noticed That Look. Neither had he noticed how apprehensive Omi's smile had grown, or the way Ken was hovering a few anxious feet away from the young woman, twisting the hem of his apron between his fingers in a frantic and not entirely successful attempt to hide some of his anxiety. Even Aya was looking somewhat cowed.

"Well, well." Youji was saying playfully, regarding Manx lazily over the top of his sunglasses. "Long time no see, Manx. You're looking beautiful as ever."  
For a moment Manx didn't say anything. She glanced briefly over at Rain, who was hovering by one of the worktops and pretending an unconvincing interest in a delivery receipt, a look of obvious dislike stealing into her blue eyes that would have had Ken proposing marriage on the spot if it hadn't been for Manx's marked and unfortunate resemblance to Sister Helena of the Assumption which to Ken's mind was even worse than a potential date reminding him of his mother. "Am I to assume," she asked, in tones that failed to be even remotely teasing, "that I have competition now, Youji?"  
For a moment Youji looked stumped, glancing over at the trim figure of the brunette before turning back to Manx. "You know nobody could ever compete with you," he said finally, but none of his teammates could have failed to notice that his voice lacked its customary insouciance, and he shot a troubled glance in Rain's direction even as he spoke.  
"I'll take that as a yes, then." Manx said archly, and smiled at the look on Youji's face. "Your actions speak louder than your words ever could. I'm obviously going to have to try harder in future, though I never thought I'd see the day you started chasing schoolgirls…"  
Youji looked scandalized. "Hey, she's eighteen!"

Omi spared his older teammate a sympathetic look. Ken tried to stifle a giggle and failed. Miserably. Manx shot him a look that had him falling silent only through sheer bewilderment, then turned on her heel and swept off toward the basement, leaving Ken staring after her in confusion. Why, he wondered, in the world should his laughing about Youji's stupid, irritating infatuation with Rain have made Manx look so thoughtful?

"Ken-kun, are you coming?"  
"Huh? Oh… oh, yeah, sure."

Twenty minutes.

Ken had timed it, more or less. Oh, he'd known there was going to be a reckoning for this one, and he'd been absolutely right. Pissed? They didn't have a _word_ for where Manx was at. Pretty much the minute the cellar door had closed behind Ken she'd had that pointed look back on her face and, when she removed three pieces of headed paper from her briefcase and placed them down on the table, he'd known what was coming clearly as if he'd seen the previews.

Twenty minutes with nothing to do but sit there and listen as Manx ripped into them like a starving wolf into a field full of fat, idiotic lambs with broken legs and raw steaks stapled to their faces. It was like nothing so much as being back at school – unless of course one looked at Ken, who still couldn't quite manage to separate Manx from Sister Helena and was wondering how many Hail Marys would get him out of this one. Omi in particular looked a naughty schoolboy being scolded by his teacher. Even Aya's usually stony façade seemed to be cracking in the force of Manx's righteous indignation.

"Women's clothing." Manx was saying in disbelief, for what had to be the two hundredth time. "I wouldn't have thought any of you could have been this foolish, this negligent, this… _monumentally_ misguided! Have you all gone mad? Kritiker gave you this card on the understanding you'd use it on missions and to cover the cost of equipment! And then you four blow the next quarter's budget in _one afternoon_ , and on what? _Women's clothing_! What the Hell were you _thinking_? Bombay, I thought you at least would have had rather more common sense than this! Even if I overlook for the moment the fact that you did all this for an unknown element, this is still _absolutely_ — Siberian! Are you listening?"  
Ken couldn't keep silent any longer. "But this isn't my fault, Manx!" he replied indignantly, the perfect picture of Innocence Accused, though he didn't quite have the self-restraint to keep himself from giving Aya a rather nasty glare and damn the consequences. "I _said_ we shouldn't do it! I _said_ there was no goddamn way we should be buying girls' clothes on that thing! It's not my fault nobody listened so I sure as shit don't see why I should have to feel guilty!"

At that, Manx gave him another brief, contemplative look. She seemed, almost, to be resisting the temptation to smile. Was it just Ken's imagination, or was the young woman looking just the faintest bit relieved? He told himself he was probably imagining it and went back to staring at his hands. He didn't have particularly interesting hands, though he seemed to be getting calluses on his palms and wasn't that going to look weird if he ever got a proper job…

"It's not exactly like," Manx said wearily, turning back to Omi "this team is exactly going to have money to spare even without the four of you doing something as stupid as this—"  
"It's not my fault!" Ken said again, sounding to Manx's ears rather like an anxious schoolboy. "I didn't want to…"  
"Yes, yes, all right Siberian. As I was saying, there's a very good reason you four can ill-afford to be short of money at the moment. What with Persia…"

Manx broke off, her eyes growing briefly troubled and she sighed slightly, shaking her head wearily. Whatever it was she was about to say, she obviously wasn't very keen on being the one to say it. What in the world had Persia been thinking? This, she thought, was almost up there with that brilliant idea the man had dreamt up of having assassins working in a stupid _flower shop_ in the first place… not that there was anything to be done about it now, of course. Persia's mind was made up, nothing Birman or herself had said had managed to quit him of it; all she could do was break it and hope like Hell Weiss didn't take it too amiss.

"What with Persia what?" Omi asked in honest confusion.  
Manx said nothing for a moment, her gaze flickering back over to Ken. Something told her it was him she was going to have to watch. Something told her she needed to have a word with him, preferably in private… "Persia," she said finally, and there was no trace in her voice of the doubts that had briefly marked her face, "has decided that, as from your next mission, Weiss will become a five-man unit." She paused briefly, adding, as if to remove any lingering doubts in her audience's minds, "You're getting a new member."

Manx had expected silence and silence was very much what she had got. For a moment, the four young men said nothing, did nothing, simply letting the information digest. Hardly surprising; it was pretty hard to swallow. For a moment she did nothing, merely gauging their various reactions – or, in Aya's case, lack of same. Omi, though, looked taken aback, his eyes wide and startled; Youji, previously sprawled lazily out across the couch, was sitting upright, his attention suddenly very much caught, caught and held. As for Ken… she didn't quite know what Ken thought he was doing, but the one thing he didn't look was particularly surprised.

But she had expected Ken to break that silence and in that prediction she was not to be disappointed.

"What!" Ken demanded. "What the _Hell_? Why do we need a new member?"  
Before Ken could finish, Omi had found his voice. "A new member? Are you serious, Manx-san?" "Perfectly serious." Manx replied calmly, glad for the excuse not to have to answer Ken's question, largely because she didn't actually know the answer. "Such is the nature of your next few assignments that Persia feels a little extra help would be of no small value. The agent in question has an intimate knowledge of the target's habits and patterns and Persia feels that extra knowledge may well be the difference between success and failure."  
"That's as it may be, Manx," Aya said, "but such an arrangement hardy needs become permanent. I fail to see why it should do any such thing."  
"For the same reasons as lay behind your our own addition, Abyssinian. Persia feels a fifth member would allow Weiss to tackle targets more numerous or more dangerous than it is, at present, currently capable of. There are, as I am sure you'll all be aware, limitations to what four men can achieve…"  
"Five men isn't exactly an army either, Manx." Youji interjected.  
Men? "It's a girl, isn't it." Ken said suddenly, and it was no question at all.

The interruption had Youji giving Ken a rather pointed look, a look Ken either ignored completely or decided to pretend to; he didn't so much as turn. He simply gazed at Manx as if aiming to unnerve her into speech. This, he thought, was not right.. Weiss was the four of them for better or worse and that, as far as Ken was concerned, was the end of it. It wasn't suddenly going to become anything other than that just because Persia, in all his infinite wisdom, decided to import a fifth member, another unknown bloody element as if the last one wasn't trying enough! Weren't teammates supposed to be able to trust one another? He couldn't just start trusting some weird girl (and Ken was convinced it was a girl) he didn't know from Adam – okay, from Eve just because Persia told him to!

"I'll be coming onto that in a minute, Siberian." Manx replied, but that didn't seem to put Ken off.  
"Come _on_ , Manx. Male or female?"  
Manx capitulated. "The agent in question is female."

(… had to be Rain. It _had_ to be. Well, shit. _Shit_!)

"Well, well." Youji said languidly, a lazy smile spreading slowly across his face. Ken longed to punch that smile. "You're going to have a young lady work alongside us, Manx?"  
"Work," Manx pointed out, "is very much the operative word, Balinese."  
It took Aya to drag the conversation back on track. "So, who is this girl?" He demanded. "If we're going to be working with her, the least you can do is tell us who she is."  
The woman sighed at the spectacle of Aya's impatience, slipping a buff file from her briefcase and tugging a few sheets of paper free, flipping casually through them and, finally, nodding. "Codename Calico. Eighteen years old. Weapon of choice: butterfly swords. She is a skilled hacker, well-versed in spying and surveillance techniques and an expert at infiltration. Calico has been working as a solo agent for the last six months, but current events and the importance of preventing an agent who possesses such obvious… _talents_ , shall we say, from falling into enemy hands has persuaded Persia that it would be too risky for her to continue working in that capacity. It is vital, Bombay, that your team take every possible step to ensure her continued safety."  
"The Hell? Can't she watch her own back?" Ken complained. "It's my fault if I screw up, why's this _Calico_ girl so different?"  
Aya frowned. "We're assassins, Manx, not child-minders."  
"I hardly think a woman like Calico will need much looking after." Manx replied coolly. "However, Persia has reason to believe that, should Schwarz get wind of her existence, they will stop at nothing to try and get hold of her. She has certain gifts, Abyssinian, which our enemies would seek to exploit. That must not be allowed to happen."  
"Gifts?" Omi asked suspiciously. "What kind of _gifts_?"  
"She is tele-empathic." Manx said simply. "Anyway, you will be joining up with her at the target site of your next mission. From there on in, Persia expects you to treat her exactly as you would one another. I trust that makes sense."

Omi nodded gravely, answering for the whole team. Ken realized Youji was looking at him and blinked in surprise when the blonde gave him a wry smile and a small, resigned shrug that really shouldn't have made him blush and did anyway. Why had Youji gone and chosen to distract him now, when he had other things to think about— the word _Calico_ wandered through his mind casual as a cat, searching for something to connect to. Aya's frown hadn't lessened slightly and, as Manx reached for her briefcase, he straightened and took a pace toward her.

"Wait, Manx," he said firmly. "Her name."  
Manx straightened. Her grip, Omi noticed, tightened slightly on the papers she held, creasing them slightly. "Is not to be disclosed at present," she said, noting Aya's scowl without pleasure. "Persia was most insistent on the subject. You may, of course, always ask her yourself."

And she turned and left after only the most cursory of farewells, hurrying from the basement. Aya looked as if he was about to follow her, but didn't. Ken, slumped in his seat scowling, didn't appear to be on the verge of going anywhere; even he appeared to be surprised when he muttered a curse he himself couldn't quite catch and scrambled inelegantly to his feet, bolting up the stairs after the young woman.

 _Calico_ , huh?

Ken barely even noticed that he bumped into Rain in the middle of the shop, knocking the slender brunette flying when she tried to catch him by the arm, though he would have been irritated by the way she even managed to make falling headlong into a display of cut flowers and landing on her ass in a cascade of carnations look daintily elegant and doubly so should he have seen the way Aya and Youji, following him up the stairs, hurried to her side and vied over who would have the privilege of helping her to her feet (Aya won). Luckily for Ken's gag reflex, he was out the door by that time.

He spotted Manx about halfway down the road; the woman, measuring herself against a buttery sunset that further burnished her already glossy curls, was ostensibly hunting for her car keys in her tiny handbag. She hadn't left yet. Thank you God and I promise I'll start going to church again one of these days even if the confession would likely take a fucking _lifetime_ …

"Calico." Ken said impulsively. "There's no such breed. Am I right?"  
Manx raised her head and turned and the sudden, genuine smile on her face damn near floored Ken. "Get in the car, Siberian," she said simply. "I think we need to talk."


	5. Moonlight Shadow

"Well, I'm off!" Rain announced.

Aya raised his head to look at the young girl. Damn, she was gorgeous! There she stood by the door, measuring herself against it in a way that looked that one bit too contrived to convince as charmingly casual. She was clad from top to toe in tight leather – a one-piece biker's cat suit in shades of black and purple, unzipped just enough to show off a tight black tee and a bit of cleavage – with knee-high black leather boots, her long, straight hair pulled up in a high plait and tied with a scrap of purple ribbon. She held a black and purple crash helmet loosely in one hand. Aya stared at her, though covertly. Youji just stared. Ken, unobtrusively leaning on the edge of the table, turned away and gazed out the window at the crowded street.

Just for a moment Rain had reminded Ken of Yuriko, but in a parodic, blurred-black-and-white-photocopy kind of way that had him wanting to take the original in his arms and punch the bad facsimile.

Youji realized rather belatedly that his mouth was hanging open and quickly closed it to save the cigarette that was in serious danger of tumbling to the floor, then took two calculated paces toward the girl, a sleepy, seductive smile playing across his lips "Whoa there, _Rain_. You know it's scientifically implausible for the same girl in the same outfit to be both damned hot and seriously cool? Where are you going?"  
"Oh, nowhere in particular." The girl said, far too casually. "And I'm sorry to say this, Youji, but no you can't come too."

Okay, Ken thought, she's dressed like that and she's going nowhere in particular. Yeah, that sounds plausible. He wanted to make an issue of it and, if it hadn't been for his decision that the best way to cope with resenting Rain for not being Yuriko without getting smacked round the face again was to ignore her unless she directly talked to him, he would probably have done just that. Hell, he thought, she'd better not have designs on my Kawasaki… she couldn't have, he had the keys and if she tried to hotwire it he'd kill her. No two ways about it. If Rain messed with his bike, Ken _would_ be forced to kill her.

"Aww." Youji was saying, trying his best to look playfully disappointed – at least Ken hoped he was only pretending to be disappointed. "Rain, you know it's not fair to make plans without telling the rest of us. What do you say we go somewhere together next time? There're a lot of places out there where they'd more than welcome a woman like you!"  
Aya cleared his throat. "Maybe Rain isn't interested in going to the kind of places that you go to for fun, Youji," he said quietly. Dangerously.  
"Yeah, well, _maybe_ she is. She isn't ever gonna know if we don't give it a try, ain't that right Rain?"

Which comment somehow had the effect of leaving Ken unsure if he'd rather have killed Rain at that moment or killed to _be_ her. No. What was wrong with his brain at the moment? This thing he had, this stupid _Youji_ thing was getting beyond a— no, he wasn't even going to think it. Ken glanced up at the pair through his fringe, and scowled when he noticed that Rain's pale cheeks had grown slightly pink.

"I don't think," Aya said even more quietly, "that would be entirely wise."  
"Forgive me for saying this, Aya," Youji replied coolly, resting a casual hand on one of Rain's leather-clad shoulders, "but it's none of your business whether Rain chooses to go out with me or not. If she wants to spend a bit of time with me, it's her decision. Okay?"  
Aya only glowered. "Maybe, but I'm not convinced Rain knows what she's letting herself in for."  
"Oh, no?"  
"No." Aya spoke coolly, folding his arms across his chest. "Look, Kudou, Rain's not like the rest of the girls you pick up and put down. She's different. She doesn't deserve to be played with."  
"Maybe not," Youji said, absently fingering one of Rain's raven locks and making Ken fantasize about running riot with a pair of scissors, "but how do you know how I play when I'm playing to win?" And he smiled. A broad, infuriating grin that Aya must have longed to punch.  
"Since when have you played for keeps?" the redhead asked derisively.  
"Since when, Fujimiya," Youji countered, "have _you_ played at all?"

And since when did you care who Youji took out? Ken thought resentfully. Geez. Part of him wanted to try and break it up but – no, he was not going to interfere. No way. If the guys wanted to make idiots of themselves over some random girl Aya should never have imported into the equation in the first place, let them. Youji and Aya were supposed to be grown-up assassins. They should know how to play nice all by themselves and they certainly shouldn't need him to tell them how to do it. He should never _have_ to tell them how to do it. Ken Hidaka had not been designed to be the Voice of Reason, fuck it!

Speaking of… shouldn't it have fitted Rain's Cute Young Innocent act that _she_ broke things up?

He hadn't been meaning to. He'd been trying to ignore the girl because she wasn't Yuriko, but Ken found his gaze wandering over to her all the same. Found himself staring. Shouldn't it have fitted her Cute Young Innocent act that she looked the slightest bit bothered about the fact that two guys she knew were fixing to come to blows over her? Shouldn't she have not been – waitaminute she was fucking _smirking_!

And Rain turned to him, belatedly realizing someone was watching her. Just for a moment she looked guilty. Caught out. A kid with her hand in the cookie jar confronted by a mother as yet too startled to think of anger. Just for a moment…

" _Hey_ —"

Ken got no further, breaking off in sudden confusion as Rain gave him what had to be, hands-down, the most beseeching look he'd ever seen on anyone over the age of twelve who wasn't Omi Tsukiyono. Her eyes frightened, she bit down slightly on her perfect, shell-pink lower lip as she glanced between Aya and Youji in frightened consternation, and fiddled with the chinstrap of her crash helmet. You're their friend, the look in her troubled amethyst pools was saying. Can't you _do_ something? Can't you stop them? God, if only he could have done! Poor little thing, Ken thought, she's hating this. How could I have thought a girl like Rain would ever enjoy being fought over like that? She's much too… much too _special_.

And Christ, what a beautiful girl she was…

Youji blinked, looking as if he had quite forgotten Ken was actually in the room. "Huh? What's the problem, kid?"  
"Oh." Ken blushed, anxiously scratching the back of his head. "Uh, nothing. Thought I kinda… but I must've been imagining it or something? Yeah, that was probably it. Probably wasn't important anyway. Sorry. Forget I spoke, okay?"

He turned away to hide his abject confusion. He'd been thinking something else, hadn't he? He'd seen something weird. Something weird about _Rain_ , something that, that… no. No, it was gone. Why would he have been thinking about Rain in the first place?

This time, he didn't notice Rain's smile.

"Aya-san," Rain said beseechingly, her head tilted slightly back, causing her hair to tumble back from her wide eyes, which were affixed on the young man's pale, dour countenance, "Youji-san, please, don't fight like this! It's not right for you to fight like this! If it really matters that much to you who I go out with, Aya-san, why don't we all go out together?" She said it like it was a revelation, like she'd discovered penicillin in her sandwich bag. "Yes! Let's go out together! So I can really feel I'm getting to know you all!"  
"Together?" Youji asked incredulously. He looked like he was about to laugh, only for him to remember who he was talking to and quickly pull himself together. "You'd like that, Rain?"

(How, Ken wondered, could I just forget what I was thinking about like that? How in the Hell could his mind change about something all by itself? Whose _thoughts_ had those been?)

The girl nodded. "Oh, yes," she said enthusiastically. "It'd be such fun. Don't you think?"  
"Well, yeah…" Youji began dubiously. "But… Rain? I hate to be the one to break this to ya, but Aya here doesn't exactly play much. Actually, it's more like he doesn't play at—"  
"Saturday." Aya said calmly.  
Youji blinked. His sunglasses slid a comical couple of inches down his nose. He stared. "Aya?"

("I don't think like that," Ken said to nobody at all. "I don't. I don't.")

"Not now." Aya said His expression hadn't changed one iota, though the look in his eyes seemed to soften somewhat as he gazed down at the pretty young girl before him. "Would Saturday night suit you, Rain?"  
"You mean… you'll come?" Rain asked excitedly, beaming up at him. "You'll really come, Aya-san? Oh, that's wonderful!"  
"Aya," Youji said, "Are you sure you're feeling all right, man? You… hey, look, _Rain_ , I'm _not_ sure that's such a great ide—"

For Rain had gently but firmly pulled away from Youji and, thrusting the crash helmet she held into his arms, hurried across the room to where the redhead stood, she wrapped her arms about Aya's waist and hugged him as if he were a large, bad-tempered teddy bear. An Aya bear perhaps; the least cuddly cuddly toy the world had ever known. Youji stared. Ken grasped the edge of the table he leant against with both hands simply for the sake of keeping his balance. And all Aya did was stand there and let her. He didn't look thrilled, no, and both Youji and Ken could tell he held himself stiff as a board, but he didn't push Rain away. He didn't even try to.

Neither of them seemed to mind that Youji and Ken were staring openly at them, their very different faces now identical twins for shock and incomprehension.

"Holy shit," Ken said flatly.  
"I don't know who that is," Youji solemnly declared, pushing his sunglasses back up his nose, "but it sure as Hell ain't Aya."  
Ken was inclined to agree with him. "Don't you have somewhere to _be_ , Rain!"

Rain started, pulling away from her unresponsive hug accomplice and glancing about herself, as if suddenly recalled to where she was and what she was doing. "Oh, no!" she cried. "My appointment! Thanks for reminding me, Ken-san, oh no, I'm gonna be so _late_!" She snatched the crash helmet from the table where Youji had placed it and bolted for the door.  
"Wait, Rain" Aya said alarmingly solicitously, as the girl stopped in her tracks and looked back at him, her gaze curious. "How are you getting there? Do you need a lift?"  
"Ayaaa," Ken pointed out, "she's wearing leathers."  
Rain ignored him. She simply shook her head and smiled up at Aya. "Oh, no. No, there's no need to worry. I'm taking my motorbike, of course! See you boys tomorrow!"

And, with another, broader smile and a playful little wave aimed at everybody and nobody, the young girl stepped lightly out through the back door and into the gathering dusk, her long, dark plait swaying as she walked, in counterpoint to her steps. She couldn't have failed to notice that Aya and Youji watched her every move as if hypnotized.

"God," Youji muttered to the four walls as the door closed behind her, a glazed look in his green eyes, "that girl is _so_ sexy."

Aya glowered. He looked as if he would have liked to say something rather pointed on the subject of Youji's increasingly vocal approval of Rain's sexiness and might even have been about to had it not been for Ken, who was thinking exactly the same thing – albeit for diametrically different reasons. Youji's comment had startled him into speech before Aya could so much as draw breath.

"Wait. So she's more sexy because she owns a motorbike?" Ken asked incredulously. "Youji, _I_ own a goddamn motorbike. I can't believe you thought I was any more sexy after you found out I had a bike than you did before!"  
"It's different for girls." Youji said fervently. "Very, very different." Even as he spoke something at the back of his mind nagged at him. That was rather a weird thing for Ken to have said, wasn't it? He almost, Youji thought, sounded like he _wanted_ me to think he was sexy. In fact, he'd almost sounded envious…  
Ken stared at him. "Why is it so _different_ — oh forget it. And you didn't remotely want on with Yuriko and she was, God, she was at least _three times_ more exciting than Rain… ugh, what's with this sudden kink for girls on motorbikes! When'd she get a bike anyway? If she can get herself a motorbike why did we have to buy her an entire wardrobe's worth of clothing?"  
"You're sure you're not just jealous, Kenken?"  
"What? _Jealous_? Of _who_? Why the fuck would I be _jealous_ , Youji!"  
Youji grinned at him and playfully ruffled his hair. Ken impatiently batted his hand away. "You don't have to worry about that, kid. There's more than enough of the Kudou to go round."  
"Shut up!"  
"Never mind that now," Aya said forcefully. "We should be grateful she chose to go out tonight."

And Ken stared at him. Just how much denser did his teammates plan on getting? Yeah but Aya, he wanted to say, don't you think that's just a bit suspicious? Rain hasn't exactly made a habit of going out of an evening up till now but she vanishes off and won't tell anyone where she's going on the same evening as our first mission with The New Mysterious Female Teammate of Mystery? Am I the only one who thinks this is way too coincidental to be a coincidence at all?

"Yeah." Youji said – and Mary Mother of God, he was serious! "We really lucked out there, don't you think, Kenken?"  
"If luck's what you call it…" Ken muttered darkly, and knew the others wouldn't hear him.

Seemingly he was, which was something else Ken didn't like one bit.

He wasn't supposed to be the smart one either.

* * *

As if that wasn't bad enough, the mission would _have_ to be taking place in the cheap cliché that was an old warehouse. A _warehouse_ , for fuck's sake. Hard to picture a more hackneyed locale short of Persia ordering them off to some haunted mansion like they were doing a Weiss Halloween Special or something equally lame. If life was a movie God should fire his screenwriter.

The warehouse, hulking and ostensibly abandoned, was like something out of a lame B-movie or perhaps a pretentious prog-rock video. A precarious pile of sagging crates stood piled by its great sliding doors, doors from which a chain like a snapped charm bracelet, it's dangling padlock nothing more than an outsize pendant, hung limply and which now stood suspiciously half-open, revealing the looming shadows of long-forgotten machinery. The entire place smelt of dust and damp and rot. Even the B-picture's curling tendrils of dry ice were accounted for in the form of an infuriatingly atmospheric ground mist that had the building's shattered shell loom ominous and yet strangely incorporeal in front of them.

And the place was still giving Ken the creeps and he resented it. Nothing that cheesy had any _right_ to be scary, damn it!

He told himself it was just the wait. Too much time hidden in damp foliage with nothing to do but stare at said warehouse and get cold was getting to him. Making him itch to just _kill_ something already and go home. Yeah. That was all. Goddamn _Calico_.

"What's _keeping_ her?" He muttered.  
"No idea, kid," Youji murmured in his ear, making Ken jump. He hadn't known Youji was standing that close! Hadn't wanted to, either. Not when it meant all he had to do was step back a pace and no Ken that's _stupid_ , Youji's strictly hands off, he's Women Only (isn't he?), he doesn't have the faintest idea you more sort of aren't (does he?), you keep your mind on the job okay? "Guess she just fancied being fashionably late. Women, huh? Even when they're going out assassinating they still keep everyone waiting for them to get ready…"  
Ken laughed almost in spite of himself. "Well, you'd know. Hey, Omi? Where'd you say we were meeting this girl?"  
"She wouldn't specify a location." Omi said quietly. "She just said the target site. It seemed logical that, if we were going in as a group, she'd meet us before we went in. I'm beginning to suspect she hasn't done the logical thing."  
"Yeah, probably." Ken said, he suspected more than a little irritably. "Come on, Omi, she's some super-amazing bad-ass solo agent, right? Why's she gonna bother waiting for something stupid like her teammates? She's already in there!"

And realized his teammates had actually listened to him. All three of them had turned to him like he'd done something other than state the (to him at least) blindingly obvious. Why _would_ a girl like Calico have waited for them? Most likely it wouldn't even have occurred to her.

"This isn't a mission one person could handle alone." That was Aya, so far silent.  
Omi nodded in agreement. "Aya-kun's right. I thought she'd want to meet us, but… oh, no. I've been stupid! Calico's used to working alone!"  
It was on the tip of Ken's tongue to say, and isn't it going to be a blast working with her if that's really the way she thinks, but he held it back. Instead, he simply shook his head and sighed. "And isn't it going to be a blast working with _her_ if that's really the way she thinks. She could have at least called in!"  
Omi ignored him. "I know what must have happened to Calico. She's a _solo agent_! It figures she'd have thought the meeting time we gave her was the mission start time, so she must have gone right in…" The teenager 's voice tailed off, and he swallowed.  
Youji glanced at his watch. "Fifteen minutes ago." He said grimly, looking up at his teammates' faces. "Omi?"  
"Let's go." Omi said simply.

And darted from the brake of rather straggly trees they had been hiding in, and darted toward the entrance of the warehouse. At least, Ken thought wearily, Omi still had the sense to stick in the shadow… still, it beat waiting around for the perhaps-mythical new teammate who didn't even seem to realize what a comm. was for.

Funny, the warehouse didn't look anywhere near as creepy up close.

After all that buildup, Ken accounted the actual interior a bit of a let-down. Sure, the dust-furred, rusting hulks of machinery were kind of ominous and the air smelt suitably stale (even if there was a rather unfortunate undertone to it suggesting that whatever the warehouse had been doing when it was operational must have involved fish in some way, shape or form) but in just about every other way it fell far short. Certainly there were no strange instances of sin visible anywhere. It was, in short, just an old warehouse. Heard it before, heard it before.

In fact, the place was so scrupulously, boringly normal in just about every way it made Ken wonder what in the Hell they were doing there. It just looked like an old fish-packing plant to him. Yeah, it was creepy, but surely there were far more interesting places for dark beasts to hang out?

"There had better be some bad guys in here somewhere." Ken muttered, nudging an upended plastic pallet out of the way with the side of one foot. "If they got bored of waiting to get their asses kicked while we were hanging about outside and are all tucked up with their teddy bears now, I'm gonna be pissed."  
" _Teddy_ bears?" Youji, hidden somewhere behind a large dust-clogged machine which looked like it had been designed to be suitably creepy first and functional only as an afterthought, drawled over the comm.  
"What? Even dark beasts have to get their heads down sometime."  
Omi, prowling the decidedly precarious-looking catwalks above the warehouse floor, shushed them. "Someone's coming."

Oh, right.

Ken ducked back behind one of the conveniently located pieces of machinery, hoping to lose himself in the shadows. Damn the dust! It would have been so much simpler if he could go climb on top of the thing, nobody _ever_ looked up when they weren't thinking about it, but that'd leave footprints everywhere and they'd sure as shit look up then. On top of everything else, his ducking back here had knocked one of the tarpaulins and there was dust everywhere… now that's just fucking _great_ , Ken thought frantically, clapping one hand over his mouth. You _don't_ want to sneeze, Ken!

The only thing he could do was hope that this was Calico deigning to show her no doubt fabulously beautiful face – he didn't care if he sneezed in front of her even if he bet the bitch did laugh at him for it – but of course life never was that simple.

"Targets." Aya whispered over the comm. For a moment Ken had the creepy feeling the guy was stood right behind him.  
Oh, brilliant, Ken thought. Do not sneeze now, for Christ's sakes. He decided this was all Calico's fault and that he now hated her even more. Where _was_ the woman anyway?  
"Siberian?" Omi said softly. "Are you all right?"  
He nodded, only to realize that was pointless. "Dust," he said in a curiously choked voice and heard Youji laugh, a whisper-soft thing which made Ken want to kick him. In the face.  
"Only you could manage that, Siberian." The guy had sounded – what in Hell _had_ he sounded like? Damn near impossible to tell, what with the comm. Ken wondered if he was blushing, had a feeling he probably was, then wondered why he was worrying about it. Mission. Right.  
"Not funny. Shut up." Ken made a mental note to kill Youji or, failing that, throw flour in the guy's face next time he had some to hand and see how he liked it.

The targets didn't seem to be in any particular hurry to make their presences felt. They stopped short a few feet into the room, the one turning to the other and saying something that none of his unsuspected audience quite caught in a self-congratulatory tone which had Youji raising his eyes heavenward, Omi sighing near-silently and Ken (now experimenting with holding his breath in a desperate attempt to keep himself from noticing the equally desperate condition of his sinuses) utterly failed to notice. He didn't notice it when the targets, an older guy in a business suit and a slim young man with something of the demeanor of a personal secretary, started ambling casually closer. All he knew was that nothing was happening and he was fed up…

… and oh, Christ, he really _was_ going to sneeze. He clapped one hand over his mouth in a frantic attempt to stifle it – not, it had to be admitted, entirely successfully. All he could hope for now was a half-deaf, mostly stupid target and the problem with dark beasts was they tended to be a lot on the ball and extremely intelligent. This didn't look good.

"—and, if all goes to plan, we'll be well positioned to demand… Oh, bless you."  
"I didn't sneeze, Sir."  
"Didn't you? Well, somebody did."

 _Shit_.

"Move in," Omi said, and even through the comm. he sounded weary. He knew it wasn't as if the guy could have helped it what with all the dust but seriously, Ken, God _dammit_.

Outside on the roof and crouched unobserved, like a panther waiting to spring, by one of the half-open skylights, a lithe figure half-hidden in a patch of conveniently-placed shadow gazed down into the abandoned warehouse through narrowed amethyst eyes as the four assassins moved in on their targets – targets who, the figure noticed, were nowhere near as taken aback as Abyssinian and his team might have hoped. Targets who had been ready for this. Cradling a sheathed weapon to its leather-clad chest with slender gloved hands, the night wind whipping back the long, shining, raven-dark hair which the stranger wore tied back in a high ponytail, they watched the ensuing battle.

"Not yet," the stranger murmured to themselves in a soft, low, musical voice. "Not yet."

As they looked down on the scene unfolding beneath them, the watching figure could have been forgiven for thinking all Hell had broken loose. For the four young men in the warehouse it just about had. Seemed these targets were so glad someone out there was trying to kill them that they'd given Weiss, as a token of their gratitude, a toybox full of assorted baddies to play with. Were all these guys in the briefing? No, probably not, they very rarely were.

Omi had managed to down the secretary as he hustled his boss back to safety courtesy of a nicely-placed crossbow bolt to the windpipe, but before Aya could send his boss to join him he had been stopped in his tracks by two ill-tempered types in matching black business suits, and when Ken had tried to go and help him out his own progress was arrested by a brawny bodyguard, who resembled nothing so much as a nicely-dressed ambulant wall and moved far more quickly than someone of that size had any right to.

Needless to say getting in the way of the guy's fist had hurt quite a bit and put Ken in an even worse mood than he had been in already. As he drove the claws of his bugnuks through the chest of brick wall guy and turned on a woman wearing far too much makeup and far too little clothing and armed with, of all things, a freaking _fan_ who jumped about like she thought she was a compellingly challenging boss in some dumb video game, decided that if he got out of this one alive he was going to kill Calico. No two ways about it. He was going to _kill_ her. Christ, and he'd assumed Aya had trouble with the whole 'teamwork' concept!

Remind me, he thought, never to bitch out Aya for thinking 'heaving katanas at helicopters' is a workable mission objective again and _why_ won't this bloody woman _stand still_!

"Having trouble, boy?" She purred as she darted just clear of the bugnuk claws for the _n_ th time.  
"Oh, shut up," Ken muttered irritably. "I don't see you doing me any damage either!"

Had he cared to look round at that moment, he would have seen a frustrated Youji struggling to subdue a gagging, wriggling target who seemed to be determined to take his time about choking to death (something Youji had never quite come to terms with; he always was caught off-guard by what a startlingly _long_ time it took to strangle a man), would have seen another man draw his gun and take aim at the blonde's head only to be felled by a crossbow bolt to the chest – Omi, still in the rafters, leveling the odds as best he could. He might even have seen Aya carefully dispose of his second besuited assailant and start after their primary target, a slightly shabby-looking man named Kawamata, only to very quickly run into further difficulties.

The redhead, his katana raised to strike, found himself staring down the barrel of a rather nasty-looking shotgun. He drew away a pace, his eyes narrowing in understated vexation only to feel something cold and sharp – the point of a knife, he suspected – dig into the small of his back. Even through the heavy leather of his coat, he felt it. Drawing himself up to his full height and letting his arm drop, Aya gazed into the dull brown eyes of his target and felt only frustration. Thought, what a pointless way to die.

"Aya-kun!" Omi called, and he sounded almost as furious as he did worried.

All he could do was watch. Watch when Youji, his target finally dispatched, was surrounded by three other near-identical men, armed with very much identical guns (very large identical guns at that) – cool even in extremis, the blonde raised his hands and graced his captors with a grin that as good as said _okay, you got me_. Watch as Ken finally realized that something was the matter here and turned, surprised by the way the noise had suddenly dropped only to pay for his momentary lapse when the woman he was fighting pounced upon him and wrestled him to the ground, pinning him face-down with one arm twisted behind him, her knee planted firmly in the small of his back and the folded fan pressed against the nape of his neck.

Omi hardly needed anyone on the ground to draw a bead on him too to know that trying anything now would be a very, _very_ bad move.

"That's far enough, children." Kawamata said coolly.

Of course we'd be outclassed, Omi thought in sudden frustration, clutching his crossbow to his chest like a child might clasp a teddy bear. Of _course_. Manx said this was too difficult for four… he wondered what had happened to Calico, and if she had been killed already and he couldn't help but feel sorry for her, for this strange young girl he'd never met. Their teammate. They hadn't been much of a team to her, had they?

All Ken wondered was why he was supposed to feel so intimidated by someone holding a fan to his throat.

"I don't suppose," Kawamata said into the sudden silence, walking, with hands clasped behind his back, slowly into a pool of moonlight falling from a large, surprisingly dust-free window as if the warehouse were his personal stage and the moonlight a spotlight, as if he were ready for his close-up, "that you're going to be so amenable as to tell me what you four thought you were playing at?" Youji thought he looked better like that, imposing rather than seedy, his demeanor that of a venerable ambassador who'd secretly turned to drink – the old bastard was showboating.  
Aya said nothing; he merely watched and waited. Why, he wondered, do they feel they have to talk first? Why do they always want to talk? From somewhere behind him, he heard Youji laugh briefly and incredulously. "Are you kidding?" He wasn't sure what he found more ridiculous; the thought that an assassin might, while shooting the shit at gunpoint with his target, decide to tell the guy exactly why he had been marked for death as if he didn't know already, or the idea of Aya shooting the shit with anyone.  
"I thought not." The man shook his head sadly as if amazed and saddened by this display of rectitude, a grandfather whose grandchildren had disappointed him so often that disappointment was all he expected. "I suppose, too, that you would not consider an old man's offer of employment, even if he were to tell you it was the only way the four of you will live to see another sunrise?"  
"No." Aya replied indifferently and Ken wished the guy had kept his mouth shut. If Kawamata was going to be so stupid as to offer jobs to guys who wanted him dead, Ken would have let him be stupid. They could have dropped the bastard the minute his guard was down and finished the job that way, right? Sure, it might have taken a bit longer but the target would be dead and they could collect the pay packet – two pay packets even and it wasn't like Ken needed the money but they _could_ use a new rice cooker… Perhaps Kawamata would let him take the job alone.  
"I see. A pity, a pity when you all seem somewhat skilled, yet if you refuse to be bought I suppose it can't be helped." Another sorrowful shake of the lowered head, a horribly pregnant pause and Kawamata looked up, smiled nastily, no longer the kindly old man – funny thing, it felt like a relief. "Kill them."

Like they hadn't seen that coming. Ken surprised himself by thinking, can this _get_ any more obnoxiously dramatic?

And the large window over Kawamata's head cracked across the middle then exploded discordantly into a million glittering shards, a sparkling, deadly rainfall of glass spinning and tumbling to the stained concrete floor. Teach Ken to ask himself that question.

The _Deus ex machina_ had arrived.


	6. More Deadly Than the Male

The first thing that the group in the warehouse noticed about the newcomer, as they sprang pantherlike through the shattered window and somersaulted to the floor, landing neatly on the ball of one foot and, brushing a stray lock of hair from their face, gazing coolly and assessing out at their stunned audience, was that they were a woman.

The second thing was that she was stunningly beautiful.

She was tall and slender and seductively curved in all the right places. In the moonlight, her pearly skin seemed to glow snow-white, contrasting sharply with her glossy, thigh-length, raven-black hair with dyed violet tips which she wore pulled back in a high ponytail. A few loose feathery lavender-tipped strands framed her high cheekbones and lovely face, half-hiding dangly silver earrings in the shape of a cross with a shining jewel of palest amethyst, glistening like a single shed tear, in the center of each.

She wore a short black leather jacket, its sleeves, laced on with purple strings which revealed glimpses of her shoulders, pushed up to her elbows, over a deep plum top so dark it looked almost black, with a silver zip and black trim that perfectly flattered her womanly figure and revealed a few inches of her flat, toned midriff. Her brief black leather shorts were held up with a purple belt, showing off long, shapely legs encased in mauve and black over-the-knee stockings and black high-heeled ankle boots. A length of plum ribbon with long, hanging ends that curled and twisted out behind her in the slight breeze had been tied about her slender neck, and in each deceptively delicate, black-gauntleted hand she clutched a short silver sword, the elaborate designs engraved on their blades glowing azure against the darkness.

But it was her eyes that really made her onlookers catch their breaths. The girl's beautiful, hypnotic amethyst occuli, so bright as to almost seem to glow in the dark, were slightly narrowed in determination and blazed with an angry fire that spoke volumes about her strength and inner resolve. Her eyes said that here was no mere fragile beauty; she was a killer, a force to be reckoned with. Here was a woman who was not to be underestimated.

She looked, in that dark, dusty place, like a creature from a delirious daydream, sultry and exotic as someone from another world: she looked beautiful but she didn't look right. Assassins didn't look like that anywhere this side of comic books and casting calls…

Ken detested her on sight. Even Schreient hadn't looked _that_ ridiculous.

Had nobody else realized that the only way she could have made her entrance at such a perfectly dramatic moment was if she had been waiting for it? Why hadn't she stepped in the minute they got into trouble, for Christ's sake—

"Calico!" Omi gasped, perfectly on cue.  
"Well, well," The girl purred lazily, in sexy, musical, in-control tones, "looks like you boys could use a bit of help…"

If it hadn't been for the woman kneeling on his back, Ken would have perfectly happily punched her in the face.

Of course she moved sinuously, her motions as elegantly fluid as the creature that was her namesake. Of course she left her opponents stunned, unable to do anything but watch as she sprang upon Kawamata and, pressing one of her knives to his throat, tore his chest apart with the other and kicked his body to the floor with a single elegantly-booted foot. Of _course_ she managed to make the brutal, painful, decidedly messy business that was an assassination look nothing but graceful, even beautiful. _Beautiful_. She was a lovely, lethal dancer and she left her audience as captivated as they would have been by any prima ballerina.

And it was disgusting. The thing about killing was that it couldn't be prettied up. The thing about killing, the whole point of it was that it was brutal and ugly. To make it look lovely was, to Ken's mind at least, to dangerously miss that point. Jesus Mary and Joseph and he'd thought _Aya_ was bad, just what kind of a person had Kritiker foisted on them this time?

He felt the woman pinning him to the ground tense and pitch forward on top of him, the fan clattering to the floor. Ken shoved her limp, heavy form off him and scrambled to his feet, relieved to see a crossbow bolt buried in the small of her back rather than any obvious signs of knife injuries. Glancing about himself for his teammates he got instead an eyeful of Calico whirling like a ballerina, her butterfly swords flashing in the moonlight as she neatly dispatched one two all three of the men clustered around Youji as if Youji couldn't look after himself or something… Biting back a growl, Ken sprung on one of the warehouse's fast-dwindling bad guy contingent, the claws of his bugnuks slipping back out with an audible click.

At least he never tried to make it look pretty.

When it was all over and the last man, the point of Aya's katana to his throat, fell heavily dead at Calico's elegantly-booted feet (the girl stepping contemptuously away from the corpse as if it were nothing at all, nothing to do with her), the girl turned to survey her new teammates, regarding them coolly from behind violet-tipped bangs. The rest of the team she passed over quickly enough. Bombay, a cautious smile on his face, was looking at her in undisguised curiosity. Balinese was giving her what he must have fondly imagined was a seductive smirk – some chance _he_ had! Siberian…

Siberian was looking at something else. The ground. Ken was too busy nudging one of the shattered corpses littering the warehouse floor with one foot. The body gave a low moan and he jumped back, stepped carefully forward again, giving him another tentative nudge. It could just be air, but…

Not that Calico cared. Her sparkling amethyst orbs settled upon Abyssinian's pale face and lingered there; she gave him a long, intense, assessing stare that had his own eyes, locked on hers, narrowing slightly in anger. She didn't miss, behind the ferocious glare, the sudden sparking of interest in those eyes, though – or his grudging respect. At that, a slow smile spread across the girl's elegantly-curved lips, the color of glossy plums.

She didn't look away; her defiant icy lavender gaze was easily the twin of his. She wondered what that Abyssinian made of meeting a girl who wouldn't be intimidated by his scowl and could glare just as well as he could. She bet he didn't like getting a taste of his own medicine for once—

" _Hey_ ," Ken said far too loudly, "this guy's not dead yet!"

Trust him to ruin the mood.

"So," she said coolly, ignoring Ken utterly, her gaze still locked on the pale Abyssinian, "this is the infamous Weiss, is it? I take it you're Abyssinian – or do you prefer Ran Fujimiya?"  
Aya started, his lips parting as, in spite of himself, he gasped. His head snapped up and he fixed Calico with a chilling, icy glower, a glower even more unnerving than the standard glare he had been directing at her a moment or so previous. The girl simply smiled wearily at him, as if she were tolerating the antics of an infuriating but much-loved child – or even a pet. "How do you—"  
"Know your name?" The girl asked sweetly. "I know a lot that might surprise you boys. I know why you, Abyssinian, have chosen to carry the name Aya. I know why you kill. I know you, Bombay, were raised an assassin and bear the name Omi Tsukiyono because you have no idea who else you should be. Balinese – Youji Kudou – a womanizing flirt heartbroken over his lost love… you see, I know everything about her. And Ken Hidaka, codename Siberian, the scandal-tainted former J-leaguer. And you didn't do it, did you? I'm well aware what passed between you and that false friend of yours…"  
"You mention Kase again," Ken said furiously, "and so help me God I'm going to break your fucking jaw."

The others said nothing, Omi glancing apprehensively over at Aya, all angry tension, with one hand resting on the hilt of his katana. Youji stood silent, stunned, his face pale and his eyes distant. Who was this girl? How could she have found out so much about any one of them, still less all of them? It was obvious, too, from the way that she talked that she knew for more about the four of them than she was prepared to share in front of the entire team, she knew things that they had kept even from one another, things _she_ knew to keep a secret in such a public situation… it was unnerving, more, frightening, that any stranger could know so much.

I know who you are too, Ken thought. And I know you're a fucking telepath so don't pretend you didn't get that.  
The girl just smiled. Who's going to believe _you_?

"You see, now, what kind of an agent I am?" The girl said, her voice as calm and casual as ever, setting both gloved hands on her slender hips. "I am codename Calico. I have worked as a Kritiker spy since I was fifteen years old, have been a solo assassin for the last six months and I am Kritiker's only Talent – Class Five, naturally. Though, after all the fuss Persia made about _you_ four, I must say I'm rather disappointed."  
Youji quirked one brow in wry vexation. "Were you expecting someone less handsome?"  
"Don't overrate yourself, Balinese," Calico retorted, her beautiful face scored with the unmistakable marks of cool contempt. The look in her eyes made Aya start slightly. "Your looks are hardly important to me. I wasn't expecting I'd have to haul all of your asses out the fire before we'd even been introduced. I'd rather assumed that the four of you were at least going to be _competent_. I guess I was wrong…"

Youji said nothing in reply, his lips slightly parted in preparation for the snappy comeback he couldn't quite seem to find. Omi flushed uncomfortably, once again clutching his crossbow like it were some kind of security blanket. She was right, wasn't she? It was no introduction to the team, that was for sure. He knew he needed to apologize to Calico on behalf of the entire team, but what apology could he ever come up with that would be good enough to excuse something like this? Even Aya looked abashed.

Somewhere in the irrelevant background, Ken raised his head, scowling.

(It vexed him all the more to realize Calico was entirely uninjured save for a cosmetic scrape along the edge of one high cheekbone that only made her look all the more lovely and didn't have a single speck of grime on her. It made Ken, flushed and disheveled and aching like he'd just gone ten rounds with another goddamn tiger, with who knew whose blood smeared over his hands and forearms and spattering his clothing, his face, feel like something the cat had dragged in. Normally this didn't bother him – well, not much anyway, no more than it could have been expected to – but he could hardly help resenting it in the face of Calico's pristine perfection.)

"For Christ's sake, _Calico_ ," Ken said resentfully, "you're on a team now! So let's see a bit of goddamn teamwork here!"  
"Teamwork?" The girl turned to him, the perfect picture of innocent bemusement. "Why mention my teamwork?"  
"Because it doesn't fucking exist, that's why!" Ken snapped. Youji winced. Ouch, he thought, looked like Ken'd let his temper out to play again… "If you're gonna be any goddamn use to us, don't go playing the Badass Solo Agent! We're a team _all the time_ , not just when it suits you!"

Calico's lips pursed. Her lavender optics narrowed, blazing cold fire, as she slowly turned to face Ken. Even in the depths of her fury, her face retained its dizzying beauty. Ken held his ground. He hadn't spent all this time being Death Glared by Aya without picking some things up.

"What's the problem, Siberian?" She asked scornfully. "Or would you rather I called you _Ken_? You're really not used to playing with the girls, are you? Don't you like the idea of a woman breaking up your little boys' club? You know nothing when it comes to women and fighting. Nothing at all! There's no reason why a woman couldn't make a good killer. After tonight's little display, I'd say that female assassins had far more going for them than you four boys ever could! So don't you dare underestimate me! Don't you ever doubt my will!"  
Ken blinked. "What's that got to do with you being crap at teamwork?" And if you hit me again teammate or no teammate I swear you'll die right here with your guts in your hands.  
"Ken," Aya said, and his tone was a warning in itself, "watch what you say."  
"Why should I?" Ken asked, and he sounded surprised. "She isn't."  
Calico smiled infuriatingly, a smile Ken judged to be rather more like a smirk and left him itching to hit it. Preferably not _sans_ bugnuks. "I'm simply calling it as I see it," she said far too placidly. "I'm not going to pretend otherwise just to make you four feel better. I'm the kind of woman who says what she thinks, Siberian. If that bothers you, that's just too bad."

Which is different to what I was doing like how, exactly? Ken wondered. Then he thought, Christ, please tell me I'm never that goddamn irritating. He was pretty damn sure he was never that revoltingly self-satisfied… he caught himself glancing over at Youji, biting his lip slightly, and was almost grateful that the guy was far too busy checking out Calico's generous, milk-white cleavage to have noticed a mere sidelong glance from the token normal guy— ah, Hell, Youji wasn't looking. There was no harm in Ken's letting that glance get a little more lingering…

"Nothing else to say for yourselves?" Calico asked coolly, flipping a stray lock of hair from her face with a single negligent gesture. "Well, while you pretty boys regain the ability to speak, I'll be off home. I don't know about you, but _I've_ got better things to do with my night than waste it hanging round you four and a load of dead guys. Oh, and don't screw up next time. I might not be there to bale you out!"

And, giving her dumbfounded teammates a cheerful little wave over one shoulder, she darted away, springing pantherlike back out of the shattered window. Her ebony locks swirled about her, her pale skin gleamed in the moonlight, and she was swallowed up by the unforgiving blackness.

"Wait!" Aya, unfreezing, shouted after her. "Your name!"  
"Forget it, Aya," Youji said, placing a heavy hand on one of the redhead's shoulders, holding him back before he could hurry off after her. "She's gone."  
"Good, she gave me the creeps," Ken said, and wasn't even surprised when the others completely ignored him, seemingly far more interested in staring out of the broken window after her – Aya in frustration, Omi in understated curiosity, as if Calico were some intriguing puzzle he wouldn't be able to rest until he'd successfully solved. Youji's expression was one of blatant interest that Ken desperately wished he hadn't seen and left him feeling weirdly twisted up inside. That girl, he thought, had to go…

It took Youji to break the sudden, uneasy silence. "Wow," he said in something that was far too close to awe for Ken's liking. "She's going to be such an asset to the team."  
Asset? Just what kind of asset was Youji talking about? "Yeah, _sure_ she is," Ken said in a tone even he had to admit verged on the heavy-handedly sarcastic. "She'll make us ten times more annoying, and fifty times less discreet."  
"Be nice, Ken-kun," Omi said reproachfully.  
"Look, why do I have to be _nice_?" Ken asked. "She sure as shit wasn't _nice_ just now and I'm a goddamn assassin!"  
Aya wasn't listening to them. He was still staring out of the window, his lips pursed, muscles tensed and his eyes burning with hard-repressed frustration. "Why," he hissed to the empty air, "wouldn't she tell us her name? Why?"  
"I'm sure she has her reasons, Aya-kun," Omi said reassuringly. "She probably doesn't trust us yet. We've got to give her time to open out to us."

A nothing of a comment and yet Youji blinked, a frown crossing his face as if he were remembering something bizarre. How, he wondered, did Calico know about _her_? how could Calico have known _she_ was gone? how did she know that much about any of them, never mind all of them? Kritiker files might well have had it, sure, but they would never have told a field agent that much about a new teammate. They'd barely told him a thing about the rest of Weiss: a dating agency would have told him more! It wasn't relevant. So how did Calico know so much? Why would she even know their birth names when the favor hadn't been returned?

She knew, the detective in him pointed out very clinically, just a bit too much.

"I don't get it," he said, almost as if he were talking to himself. "I just don't get it…"  
"What?" Ken said suddenly. "What don't you get?"  
"Huh? Oh, uh, nothing. It's nothing. Thinking aloud. Forget it, Kenken."

Didn't sound like nothing from where Ken was standing. He held that thought, filing it away for future consideration. Youji didn't look it most of the time, but he was exceptionally astute and equally observant. If he didn't think something about this added up chances were it didn't. He'd have to remember to bug him about it later. It was Ken's experience that if he were to bug Youji long and hard enough about something Youji would ultimately tell him what it was just to shut him up _asking_ …

"Come on, Aya-kun," Omi said, tearing his gaze away from the broken window and slowly, reluctantly turning back toward the gaping door. "Worry about that later, okay? We'd better get going. Rain-san will be back by now and the last thing we need is her wondering where everyone's gone…"

And Ken stared at him. He stared at Omi for a long time. A very long, very uncomfortable stretch of time. Then he shook his head as if he couldn't believe he was hearing this, and he turned away, sighing dramatically.

"I never thought I'd say this," Ken said absently, to nobody at all, "but Tsukiyono? You're an idiot."

* * *

The purr of a motorcycle, soft at first, but growing louder and clearer in the absurd, if incomplete still of the night as it grew closer and closer and finally stopped short. The clink of metal on metal as the keys were tugged from the ignition, the softest whisper of long, long hair tumbling easily from the confines of a crash helmet, and footsteps. Humming. A woman's voice, absently crooning some beautifully mournful American song: _You never call me when you're sober, You only want it 'cause it's over…_ Even here and now, singing a sad song absently to herself, her voice was soft and enchanting and heavy with captivating emotion, granting the lyrics a compelling power few singers could ever have conveyed. _Don't cry to me, if you loved me, you would be here with me—_

She was home. Smiling wistfully, she walked back to the store, her footsteps light and dainty, her loose curls tumbled by the soft night breeze playing about her, the helmet hanging from one hand, casual as a child carrying a satchel. The subtle warm vanilla scent that was so characteristic of her delicately fragranced the air. Humming, she reached for the door handle.

"Good night?" Ken Hidaka said.

She turned, her loose raven hair coiling about her, a stray hank or two falling across pale cheeks and into startled heliotrope orbs. The crash helmet slipped from her delicate fingers, landing with a heavy thump on the doorstep. Her beautiful features were set in a mask of sheer terror, her eyes wide and shadowed, her pale lips parted in a perfect O of fright.

"Oh!" She cried, both pale hands clutching at her chest. "Don't do that! You frightened me! I… Oh, my God."

She paled, her already wan cheeks growing even more drained of color as he stepped into the light, as she caught sight of him – his blood-spattered skin, his torn, stained clothing, the gauntlets on his hands. Instinctively scenting danger, she backed away, gasping as she felt the wood of the door bang against her back. She couldn't take her frightened eyes off him.

"The blood," She said, gulping. "Where did all the blood come from? Ken."  
"Don't play dumb," Ken said quietly – she had never known him so quiet, so eerily calm. "You're pretty good, Rain, but you ain't that wonderful an actress. Where'd you clean up? Safe house? That where you kept the outfit?"  
The girl simply stared at him in incomprehension, incomprehension Ken judged to be nothing but well-feigned. "I don't know what you're talking about. Clean up? What's going on? I… I'll tell Aya!" She bit her lip at the look that slipped into Ken's eyes and made itself at home there – exasperation, pure and simple.  
"What the Hell do you think's going on, _Calico_?" Ken threw the codename at her like it was a challenge, unable to suppress a smile at the spark of recognition in the girl's amethyst eyes – no, really not that good an actress. Who was? "Yeah, and I know you're Calico the Mysterious New Teammate of Mystery. And don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about. I saw you rip a guy's chest apart with those cute shiny knives you use. Now _drop_ the sweet little innocent act, it don't suit you any more than it does the rest of us."  
"H… how could you know that?" Rain stammered.  
"Because I'm not _fucking blind_ , that's how! Come on, Rain! You recognized me in this stuff, didn't you?" Ken asked, gesturing vaguely to his own bloodied clothing and growling in frustration at the girl's answering nod. Somehow, it wasn't what he wanted to hear. "Well, exactly! Changing your clothes and hairdo does not make you a mistress of goddamn _disguise_! And what in fuck have you done to the others that they can't see this, huh?"

And Rain pulled herself up to her full height, her beautiful eyes sparkling with defiance, her head held high and her jaw set. The fear had gone (that was if, Ken noted, it had ever really been there in the first place), replaced by nothing but steely fortitude and a quiet kind of inner resolve. The lovely young girl was more than willing to rise to Ken's challenge, determined not to be bullied any more. She was not going to be daunted by this unstable young man in his blood-stained clothes. All she felt now was anger at the boy's presumption.

"Why should I have done anything to them?" She asked, her voice low and dangerous. "I've done nothing. Just because you've spotted the truth about me doesn't mean I've done anything to keep the others from realizing it too. They're, you're all my teammates. My friends. The last thing I want is to put you all in… no, no, Ken, you're obviously just the suspicious kind! It's not my fault that you've got a suspicious mind any more than it is my fault your friends – _our teammates_ , Hidaka, don't you care about what's good for this team? – it's not my fault they're willing to trust—"  
Trust. "That's the whole goddamn problem!" Ken cried in furious panic. "I'm… it's just… shit, Rain, don't you get it? I should be wanting to trust you and the others should be calling me a fucking moron for it, not the other way round! It doesn't make sense this way! If I can see it they should sure as shit see it too! What are you doing that's made them _dumb_?"  
"I already told you," Rain said eerily calmly, "I'm not doing anything." Believe it, you stubborn bastard, she murmured into his mind. _Believe it_! "They just want to trust me. You want to trust me, too. I know you do."

You know you do. She whispered it, though her lips didn't move, they only curved up into a gentle, intoxicating smile. She had the kind of smile a guy could get drunk on… Soft, seductive, compelling as siren song she whispered, you want to trust me. And he did, Ken did want to trust her. He'd always wanted to, right? He was just being stupid and stubborn because she was a girl, because Youji thought she was beautiful and he hadn't liked Aya bringing her home with him… he'd never given her a chance. Rain. Poor Rain, he'd done her down. How could a girl like this one, he wondered dazedly, be anything but trustworthy? Someone so young, so hurting and vulnerable, so _beautiful_ —

Yeah, but I don't go for girls like this, something small and petulant said stubbornly.

— _beautiful_ , dammit Ken! She's beautiful! Nobody that beautiful, that damaged, could possibly be wishing you ill. You know, Ken, everyone thinks Rain's an amazing girl. Why don't you? You're just being stubborn. Even Aya thinks she is. Hell, Youji wants her and you know what high standards he's—

High standards, hell. Try anything over eighteen that shows up in a short skirt. He'd fuck _a target_ if she happened to be cute. And (well hi there, Sister Anne. Sister Anne, where've you been all these years?) if everyone jumped off a cliff, Ken Hidaka, would you do it too? _Everyone_ thinks I'm dead. Doesn't mean I've gotta go lie down.

—because she's different. Different. _Special_. You want to protect her. You want to trust her. She's an amazing girl—

Amazing pain in my _ass_! She's a treacherous, manipulative, conniving bitch with a hidden agenda a mile wide who's out for what she can get and _I know that_! Why won't she tell the others she's Calico? Why doesn't she want me to? Why the fuck is she here in the first place? She's not on the level, never has been and whose thoughts are these, these aren't my thoughts, my mind can't just change all by itself and _Jesus_ , she's done this to me and she's done it before hasn't she! _Different and special_? I don't think like this! Who the fuck does?

"Get _out_ of my head!" Ken shouted. " _Get out_!"

Rain recoiled, her head jerking upright as if she had been startled out of sleep. Just for a moment, she looked angry. Horribly, totally angry. Just for a moment, she didn't look beautiful at all…

"You're… you're not being fair, Ken. My only crime," Rain said, turning quickly away as if to hide her face and, with it, the look in her eyes (was that moisture in their corners, tears, or just another part of the game?) her voice becoming thick with emotion, "was to try and hide myself. I don't want to bring trouble onto your friends, you… Aya-san… I can't afford for that to happen, I can't lose this now, not after— I'm sorry. I'm talking too much. Ken, I'm begging you – don't tell them. Please, don't tell them. If it gets out I'm here I'll have to… they'll find out, you'll all be in danger, anything could happen!" She twisted her slender fingers together as if she were hoping to tie them into a granny knot, she bit her lip.  
"Anything," Ken said flatly, and laughed without humor. "You'd rely on screw-ups to protect you?"

He simply shook his head at the hurt look that flashed across the girl's face (she couldn't believe he could possibly be so unkind as to bring that up – or was it that she couldn't believe he'd failed to be moved by her beautiful anguish?). Shook his head, and realized he was absolutely sick of the sight of her, the sound of her voice, and now that he thought about it he had never much liked warm vanilla either. Where was the appeal in walking about the place smelling like an explosion in a particularly sticky ice-cream parlor? Stepping forward, he thrust Rain away from the door, ignoring her _moue_ of disgust at the smell of blood that clung to him, pushing it open only to pause, one hand resting on the doorknob. There was something he still needed to say.

"I know you're playing with us, Rain," Ken said, and his voice was so paradoxically hushed he barely caught it himself, but he knew Rain would hear every word. "I don't know what you want with my team, but I'm going to find out. And if it's anywhere near as fucked up as I think it is, you're gonna wish you'd never been _born_."

And slammed the door in the girl's face.

For a moment, Rain said nothing. Did nothing. She simply stared at the closed door, her violet eyes burning with hard-repressed fury, her entire body tensed in preparation for a confrontation that wasn't going to come. It took everything she had not to chase after Ken, punch him hard in the gut and demand an apology for everything he had said to her, the accusations he had made, she knew Aya-san and the others would take her side – but no. Satisfying though that would be, it would only be counterproductive (the slap, that weekend Aya-san had taken them all to buy her clothes, had probably been a mistake). It wouldn't help her cause to do that…

But how dare he treat her like that? How _dare_ he _threaten_ her? Didn't Ken _know_ how fragile she was? How could he not understand what she'd been through, already, in her eighteen short years? Didn't he have any idea what she had already endured, what she'd had to go through to turn her from the helpless, tormented dark-haired little girl who'd mourned her beautiful, gentle mother's untimely death, who'd silently suffered violent abuse, terrible neglect and, ultimately, traumatic betrayal at the cruel hands of her drunken father, into the determined young woman she'd become?

Serenity Raven Kath'rynn Sakura Enigma Hikari Akegata was not a woman to be crossed lightly.

There was too much at stake for her to sit back and let Ken ( _Ken_ , for God's sake: what kind of a name was that? Who was a nobody like that boy to threaten a considerable woman like her?) betray her. After tasting freedom, she simply couldn't go back to the way she'd been living before. She couldn't lose this refuge too. She couldn't lose Aya-san…

Well then, Weiss could stand to lose Ken. It would, she thought as she absently reached for the door, be as well if that one were to be discreetly removed from the picture, temporarily or otherwise. The others wouldn't mind – he'd been so infuriating lately – and she was sure Weiss wouldn't miss him. They had her now. They could afford to lose Ken. If he wouldn't be swayed by the charm offensive, there were other campaigns she could mount.

There was, after all, more than one way to kill a kitten.


	7. She's a Smooth Operator

Of all the things Ken might have suspected Manx might have the tendency to do whilst in private, or for that matter whilst stuck in traffic with a teenage assassin namely him, singing along to soulful love songs on the radio (in a surprisingly sultry voice that made Ken think of lounge singers, not that he'd ever seen a lounge singer outside of bad American movies) would not have been one of them. Well, people were unexpected. Didn't make his situation any less excruciating, though. It wasn't like Manx was a bad singer or anything; it was more that she was, well, she was _Manx_. Did she sing in the shower too?

Ohmygod. He hadn't wanted to have that thought. Manx in the shower. She _was_ an exceptionally attractive woman, after all. Jesus God and help. Thou shalt not covet thy boss' secretary especially not when you're way too young for her and she could eat you alive and oh Christ this just got worse and worse. So that was why Youji kept hitting on her and fuck, he hadn't needed to think about Youji either. The guy had been the object of rather too many of Ken's more recent fantasies for him to even be able to think of his teammate without feeling awkward.

Quietly cursing, once again, his inability to discriminate where it came to the matter of personal attraction, Ken concentrated on the view out of the passenger side window and desperately hoped he wasn't blushing and knew there was no chance of _that_. The only positive from his point of view was, horrendously embarrassing though this situation was, at least he'd be extremely unlikely to think the woman reminded him of Sister Helena of the Assumption any more when everyone knew that, under the nun outfit, Sister Helena didn't actually exist.

He bet she'd forgotten he was there. He didn't really want to point out that he _was_ present, actually, either. It'd probably just annoy her…

"Manx?" He said finally, hoping he didn't sound too frantic, "what are we going to tell him again?"

Manx started, breaking off and glancing over at him in surprise and leaving Namie Amuro stranded in the middle of the chorus; Namie carried gamely on anyway, little minding that she was suddenly going solo. Whoops, Ken thought, looks like she really _did_ forget I was there.

"Oh. Siberian." She smiled distractedly. "Did you want something? Sorry, I don't usually have company when I'm driving."  
Should he mention that he'd guessed that much? No, probably not. "What are we going to tell Persia?" he asked instead. "I mean… from what you said he thinks Calico's the best thing that ever happened to us. Is he really going to change his mind just because we think she more sort of isn't?"  
Manx frowned; the traffic inconsiderately chose that moment to start moving again and she quickly put the car back in gear, pulling past the latest set of traffic lights. "I don't like the way that girl's behaving any more than you do," she said. "Persia needs to know there's something the matter. I – well, I doubt he'll change his mind about her presence on your team, but he might at least start to _think_ a bit."

Think a bit? Ken pulled a face. Persia had stopped thinking? Well, shit. The last thing any covert assassin – Ken being no exception – wanted to be told was that the man who issued his orders was embracing the Well, It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time School of Management. True, Ken favored that approach himself more often than not, but, well, he was allowed. It wasn't like he'd drag anyone else down with him, well, not really, and it wasn't like he was doing it deliberately. Things just seemed to happen round Ken. Unplanned, embarrassing and nigh-on lethal things of the kind that (and this was the annoying part) _would_ _never in a million years have happened to Aya_.

Persia, though? Well, it wasn't like Persia had ever come across an unexploded tiger, was it?

"I don't know what he thinks he's been playing at, lately," Manx said with a small, tired sigh that made her seem, for the first time since Ken had met her, only human after all. Just another woman wearied by the idiocies perpetrated by the men in her life. "This _Calico_ girl can do no wrong. She's the exception to every rule. I never thought I'd see the day Persia allowed an untested agent into Weiss—"  
"Say what _untested_?" Ken interrupted, his voice urgent. "Hasn't she killed before? But you said…!"  
Manx sighed again, shaking her head. "Yes, I know what I told you about Calico's background, but…" She broke off, turning in her seat (the traffic had conveniently reached a dead standstill again) and gave Ken a steady, assessing gaze, her blue eyes only entirely serious. "Ken."  
If it hadn't been for the seatbelt holding him back Ken swore he would have fallen off his seat. As it was he flinched and stared, and stared openly. Of course he'd known Manx knew his forename, but things had to be getting serious if she was actually prepared to use it. Siberian or nothing, that was the general rule… "Um, what—"  
"You are not to tell anybody what I am about to tell you. Not your teammates and _definitely_ not Calico. Do you understand?"  
"Okay, sure – why not my team?"  
"Because your team, as of present, are every bit as infatuated with Calico as Persia is," Manx pointed out. "Do you honestly think that what you told one of them, in confidence, about that girl wouldn't get back to her somehow?"  
"Well, I…" Ken hesitated. He shook his head, slumping back into his seat and sighing expressively. "No."  
The woman nodded briskly. "Which is exactly why you're going to keep what I am about to tell you to yourself."

Well, Ken supposed he couldn't fault that logic. Right now he guessed he couldn't trust his teammates any further than he could comfortably have thrown them – certainly not where Calico was concerned. Hell, they didn't even believe that Rain _was_ Calico – not that he'd been feeling optimistic enough to share that piece of news with them either. Even dropping a couple of anvil-sized hints over the breakfast table (Jesus you look done in, Rain, what time'd you get to bed? Hey, you've cut your cheek? How did that happen?) hadn't done any good. All he'd gotten for his pains was a patented Aya Fujimiya Leveling Glare of Icy Death and a plaintive plea from Omi that he stop harassing Rain when the poor girl was so _tired_ …

"Now, according to Calico's files," Manx was saying, "she's Japanese-American, her IQ is 272 and she graduated from high school at the age of thirteen. She's been active as a Kritiker agent since she was fifteen, she's an expert spy, she's easily Bombay's equal when it comes to computers, she's been working as a solo assassin for the last six months and she just happens to be a Class One Talent."  
"Yeah, she said that," Ken said absently, then blinked. "What's a Class One Talent?"  
Manx gave him a sidelong glance. "I'll come back to that, Siberian. As things stand, I'm beginning to notice certain… _inconsistencies_ in the stories agent Calico is telling. From Bombay's reports, Abyssinian discovered Rain – _Calico_ – wounded after a mission and brought her home for you boys to nurse to health. During that time, Bombay noted a number of older injures on her body and surmised she had been imprisoned for a considerable period and subject to a campaign of abuse…"  
"Manx," Ken interrupted, leaning forward in his seat to try and get a better look at the woman's profile, "don't think I'm sticking up for Calico or anything but if she really _is_ a Kritiker agent—"  
"You're thinking she could have been captured on a mission."  
Ken shrugged. "Well, it's not exactly unheard-of, right?"  
"No," Manx admitted, "it isn't. But her records don't mention any failed missions. Her status has been _active_ ever since she joined. If she had been captured and held for more than twelve hours she would have been reported as missing in action and her files would have reflected that. She can't have been a successful solo agent _and_ a helpless prisoner at the same time, Siberian. Furthermore, I could find no evidence of any assassinations she successfully completed anywhere outside of her own files. None of her so-called _targets_ were of any real note, none of their death certificates cite suspected foul play as a probable cause, only one of them was even under investigation by Kritiker at the time… I suspect they simply died. Finally, Kritiker don't make a habit of relying on solo agents, Weiss are our only assassins and in all the years I've worked with Persia, I've never heard him so much as mention any agent who possesses psychic powers."  
"So, if she's lying to us, and she's lying to you… who the Hell is she?" Ken asked. "And what does she want with Weiss?"  
"That's the problem," Manx admitted as she swung the car into a parking space. "I have absolutely no idea, but her presence seems to indicate Kritiker has suffered a severe security breach. You were right to mistrust her, Siberian. Come on."

* * *

It was dark, as ever. Dark and yet all the same Ken found himself dazzled. All he could see was the man's silhouette and a lot of screaming painfully bright light pouring from behind him and all it did was reconfirm the general big-mother-with-a-beard impression he'd gotten on so many other occasions – and occasion was the word. Persia obviously believed in making a show of things. Every so often Ken got a glimpse of what looked like some hellishly expensive tailoring as the man shifted position slightly but really, how weird was it that a guy who could score an office like _this_ and a secretary like _that_ had a nice suit on? So far, he owned, so boring.

The only difference this time was Manx. She was, this time, not just another dimly-glimpsed shadow beside the desk but a heavy, breathing presence by his side. An _angry_ presence. What Persia was saying was obviously not what the woman had wanted to hear. Far from it.

It wasn't helping Ken's temper that Persia only seemed to remember he was there intermittently.

"I fail to see," the man was saying for what felt like the thousandth time, "quite why you consider Calico to be such a detriment to Weiss, Manx. Her skills alone should make her a valuable asset."  
"Her presence is proving just as divisive as I said it would," Manx said tightly, inclining her head slightly toward Ken as if his presence alone was an indictment and, in a way, she was entirely correct. "If she is allowed to remain in Weiss, she'll make successful completion of missions impossible. Siberian is unwilling to trust her and his teammates have started to turn on him. Abyssinian and Balinese are fighting for her attentions—"  
Persia shook his head, cutting her off. "As I have already told you, and as should be obvious from her files, agent Calico is a consummate professional. A considerable woman like that isn't about to put trivial romantic squabbles above her duty as an agent or allow herself to forget her own position in her team. She knows far better than to jeopardize her position with an inopportune love affair."  
" _Sure_ ," Ken retorted, "but has anyone told Balinese that? Or Abyssinian?"  
"Weiss are professionals, and Calico has assured me there will be no difficulty."  
Manx sighed, shaking her head. "Of course she has. Persia, I've read her files. Brilliant she may be, but she's eighteen years old. She has no experience of working with others, or of living with the stressors Weiss are routinely exposed to. How can we be sure she isn't going to forget herself when – excuse me a minute, Siberian – her teammates have enough difficulty with emotional attachment as it is _without_ protective sentiment and sex becoming an issue?"

At which remark Ken blushed furiously and thought of Youji and was very, very thankful that it was too dark in here for Persia to see his expression. Or for Manx to tell that he was blushing.

"Agent Balinese," Manx said, "is a charismatic young man. Abyssinian is not without physical charm. Calico herself is… unusually alluring. I don't see how _professionalism_ is going to make any difference in such a situation."  
Persia leant forward, placing his hands down heavily on his desk. It was hard to tell in the dark, but he looked as if he were trying to restrain his temper. "Weiss are not high-schoolers, Manx…"  
"And that's precisely why I'm worried. High-schoolers get to go home."  
"Let me speak, please." He _was_ losing his temper. Ken took a pre-emptive pace backwards and wished he knew where his bugnuks were. Actually, he _did_ know where his bugnuks were. They were tucked away in one of his bedroom drawers beneath a pile of old soccer jerseys and doing him no goddamn good at all. "As I was saying, Weiss are not high-schoolers. They are, as I am sure they are all well aware—" even in the darkness Ken could tell the man was giving him a rather pointed glance; he bridled slightly, set his hands on his hips and glared back, "—trained professionals. They will, I'm sure, be able to cope with a female teammate without undue hysteria if she is the best person for the job. Agent Calico will be an asset to her team, provided her team allow her to be. If Weiss are unable to see past her gender, resort to mollycoddling her or start bickering over her, that says more about the men of Weiss than it does about Agent Calico."  
"That may be so," Manx said quietly, "but it misses the point. Weiss are professionals, yes, but they're _children_ , Persia. You can't foist an attractive young woman on a team of frightened boys and not expect nature to take its course. And when it does, I do not want to be the one to pick up the pieces. Come on, Siberian. I'm sure Persia has work to do."

And she turned on her heel and swept from the room, leaving Ken with nothing to do but give Persia a dubious glance and follow her. God knew he didn't want to stick round. Not when the light was hurting his eyes and he was getting a creepy feeling he wanted to kill Persia, anyway.

All the same… children?

Manx was waiting for him in one of the anterooms, a space every bit as large, echoing and ruthlessly overdesigned as Persia's office had been. As she caught sight of Ken (looking, as ever, hopelessly out of place in worn jeans, somewhat battered trainers and an overlarge tee-shirt – sometimes she had to wonder what size that boy thought he was) she gave him a weary smile and slumped with deliberate inattentiveness down into a low-slung black armchair no doubt chosen out of some kind of catalogue specializing in Power Furniture for the Executive Bastard, sighing and kicking off her high-heeled shoes. In spite of the perfect makeup and the power suit, Ken thought she looked tired.

"Well," she said inconsequentially into the heavy silence. "Did you notice anything different about him?"  
Ken, who'd been busying himself getting a cup of water more because he wanted an excuse to play with the water cooler than because he actually felt thirsty, raised his head in surprise. "No, not really," he admitted. "But I don't really see him much when he's not doing the whole deny-these-dark-beasts thing. Except he seems to have turned into Calico's Number One Fanboy."  
Manx snapped her fingers. "Correct answer, Siberian."  
"Well, it was creepy. Is he gonna say Hi to her on the next tape or something?" Sitting far more cautiously on an equally sporty leather couch, Ken took a sip of the water and frowned slightly. "God damn, these chairs are uncomfortable."  
"No, Persia wouldn't want people getting comfortable in his waiting room," the woman answered cryptically. "Anyway, Siberian, if I may make so bold, I have a suggestion I'd like to put to you."  
"A suggestion?"  
"Yes," Manx replied, tossing a stray curl back over one shoulder. "I think I'd like to see Rain… I'd like to see her in action, as it were. We need to meet properly. Now, I appreciate this might be…"  
"No it isn't!" Manx looked up, surprised, only to realize Ken was grinning. He looked more animated than she had seen him in days; he didn't even seem to notice he'd spilled half the cup of water on the couch. "It's not difficult at all! See, Rain wants us all to go on some crappy team night out or something tomorrow because Aya and Youji wouldn't stop arguing over who was gonna take her out first. Why don't you come? It'd be totally great because I could just say you were our friend and I met you while I was out today so I asked if you wanted to come too, she can hardly let on she knows you when she's using her Get Out Of Being Calico Card, come on Manx, I need the moral support, what'd you say?"  
Manx paused, frowning thoughtfully. She had to admit Ken's idea sounded good – it definitely had the ring of expediency about it. "You couldn't very well say your friend Manx was coming out with you…"  
"Be Erika," Ken said eagerly. "Erika can go instead. Come _on_ Manx, save my life, I promise Youji'll keep his hands to himself so _please_?"  
Manx smiled. She nodded. She said, "okay."

* * *

Saturday afternoon and the shop closed early for once and Rain, stood in the middle of the kitchen, performed a perfectly-executed twirl, her long hair fanning out about her as she gracefully span on the spot. As she moved, Youji and Aya simply stared while Omi smiled approvingly. Ken wondered where her henshin stick and cute little animal companion was, and why some annoyingly tinkly Magical Girl Transformation Tune hadn't started playing in the background as the room filled with glowing golden light and the stock footage kicked in and what had his goddamn sisters done to his brain?

She was wearing a tight black top with long sleeves made of hot pink mesh and a ring of small sparkling white rhinestones surrounding the neckline. The elaborate front print was done in shades of teal and pink. Her slightly flared jeans had elaborate designs embroidered around their ankles, and on her feet she wore a pair of hot pink Chuck Taylors. A red, green and white belt loosely girded her narrow waist and a black choker studded with pink stones encircled her pale throat. Her tightly curled black hair was pinned back with a pair of pink and teal hair grips and had been allowed to tumble loosely about her face and shoulders. Beneath the top they could just see the twin strings of her halterneck bikini.

"Rain," Ken said cautiously, "not to ruin the moment or anything… we're going swimming."

The pool had, of course, been Youji's idea. Oddly enough, Rain had jumped at it. She hadn't seemed to realize there was anything odd about the idea of Youji suggesting they go swimming. Omi had lectured Youji for taking advantage of Rain's naivety after the girl had left but, Ken noticed, he hadn't suggested they go somewhere else. Omi seemed almost as taken by thought of seeing Rain in a bikini (for Ken was sure she wouldn't dream of wearing anything else) as Youji was. Aya hadn't said anything, but it was obvious from his silence that he wasn't displeased by the suggestion.

Secretly Ken didn't mind either. Sure, he'd have to tolerate his teammates fawning over Rain in her swimwear, but there would be… you could call it a certain _compensation_.

Rain had pretended to be pleased when Ken had casually mentioned, to Youji's all-too-visible delight, that their friend Erika would be joining them, but though the act might have fooled his teammates it hadn't fooled Ken. Rain was pissed. She clearly hadn't been banking on the presence of another woman and the news that there would be one present after all – and one whom she couldn't easily eclipse with her stunning beauty – seemed to have dampened her enthusiasm for the trip somewhat. Not that she could admit it, of course. Weiss were supposed to be her friends, not her harem.

"I know we're going swimming," Rain replied shortly. "That's no reason to look untidy, Ken-san."  
"Ah, Ken always looks like that," Youji said casually. "He's Ken. It's just who he is. Leave him, Rain."

Ken blinked, glancing at Youji in mild surprise. Okay, the blonde's tone had been dismissive enough and his words had been, well, nothing out of the ordinary but if Ken had caught the implications right and he saw no reason why he shouldn't have done… Jesus, had Youji just _stuck up_ for him? Against _Rain_?

Rain pouted slightly, giving Ken a sidelong look out of slightly narrowed amethyst orbs. "He isn't going to change?"  
"No," Ken said shortly. "He isn't."  
Omi, as ever, ignored it, deciding to go the diplomatic route. "It's half past three. We're running slightly late. Erika-san's going to think we're not coming if we leave it much longer."  
"Ah!" Youji pretended to look horror-struck, placing one deceptively slender hand to his heart in exaggerated shock and making Ken giggle almost in spite of himself. "The great Kudou making a beautiful young woman wait for him? If this gets out, I'll never get a date again! I'll never live this down! Omi, we must leave. We must leave at once."  
"Well, you heard the guy," Ken said. "I won't get changed because if I did it'd kill Youji's sex life dead and I don't think I want that on my conscience too." And I don't see the point when I've got to get changed again when we get to the pool and I don't know what's wrong with what I've got on anyway.

The sad fact of the matter was that he was already doing his best.

Youji grinned. "See, Rain? He's not unreasonable when he wants to be."

Rain's only reply was to give Youji a dizzying smile that had Ken longing, just briefly, for her sudden and violent death before hurrying over to join Aya by the door. Youji, keeping up a constant running commentary about girls and pools and how he hoped Manx would decide she wanted to swim and speculation on what kind of a bathing costume the woman might choose (a one-piece suit, Youji thought; Manx was after all a lady), joined them – he couldn't stand the way Aya had, seemingly without so much as trying, started to monopolize Rain's attentions. It was, in fact, beginning to annoy him. It was beginning to annoy him quite a lot.

Ken shrugged and followed. He didn't suppose he had a lot of choice in the matter. Quite honestly he'd rather have spent the afternoon coaching, but there was nothing he could do about that. He'd make it up to the kids tomorrow. The pool it was.

* * *

Ambling out of the changing rooms and down the terraces armed with a towel and a bottle of sun cream, his sunglasses rendered by context only entirely commonplace, Youji found himself experiencing the common poolside dilemma that was not knowing where to look first. Aya, sat a few feet away quietly and ostentatiously reading a book (didn't he plan to go in?) Youji let his eyes slide off; Omi, already by the poolside, had been shanghaied by a group of teenagers who clearly recognized him from school or the shop. Youji let his gaze wander. There were far more inviting prospects to consider.

There was the athletic young woman pulling herself elegantly out the pool, sunlight on her bronzed limbs and water coursing down her slender body; quite the looker, but perhaps too much the serious sportswoman for Youji's liking. He'd have to point her out to Ken, they could have a great time utterly failing to get to know one another because they were too busy being quite absurdly sporty. Then there was that group of pretty college girls congregating about halfway down the pool – one of whom, he noticed, had nudged her friend: both turned to gaze at him. He bore that look in mind and continued scanning the area. No sign of Rain as of yet, but that shapely redhead in the slinky black one-piece sunning herself – could that be the beauteous Manx he spied?

He couldn't be sure, but the boy in the short-sleeved shirt arguing with a lifeguard was definitely Ken Hidaka. Youji sighed, raised his eyes heavenward, and wandered casually over to him. It wasn't normally his style to get involved, but he didn't want his teammate getting them all thrown out before they'd even hit the water.

"Something the matter?" he asked, giving the lifeguard a weary sorry-mate-I-can't-take-him-anywhere smile over the top of Ken's head.  
The lifeguard smiled back, deciding to see if he could recruit the newcomer into taking his side. "Friend of yours?" he asked, gesturing absently toward Ken.  
"He can be," Youji said noncommittally. "What's the problem?"  
Unfortunately for Youji, Ken appeared to have exactly the same idea as the lifeguard and was now looking beseechingly at him. Ken could beseech very well when he put his mind to it; it was something to do with having wide brown eyes. "Youji, tell this guy I'm not taking my shirt off in the pool while goddamn _Rain's_ watching."  
"Oh, is that what all this is about?" Youji asked in surprise. "Come on, kiddo, I know you don't like Rain but you can take your shirt off in front of her, surely?"  
"No," Ken said firmly, "no, I can't. It's embarrassing."  
"Embarrassing? Look, I know you don't like Rain but you're not allowed to wear a shirt in the pool unless you're a burns case or a pregnant woman and Hidaka," Youji said firmly, "unless things have changed considerably since I last looked you are not a pregnant woman."  
" _Exactly_ ," Ken replied exasperatedly, as if light had finally dawned. "I couldn't possibly think of outdoing Rain in the angsty scarring stakes, could I? Can I go now?"

Oh yeah.

Youji turned to the lifeguard and smiled apologetically. "He's fine like that…"

Somewhere in the distance, the changing-room doors banged. Out of the corners of his eyes Youji saw Aya start, raising his head in surprise as he heard a young woman call his name, only to be startled in turn when she called to him too. Youji turned, his brows curiously raised – and stopped short, and stared. He could do nothing but stare.

She wore a black halterneck bikini which revealed her beautifully flat stomach and flattered her curves perfectly. The bikini top tied behind the neck and back with purple straps, edged at the top of her generous bust and with a single narrow stripe of the same deep purple. Two further purple bows were visible at her shapely hips and the high cut bottom, which revealed so much of her long, long legs, had narrow purple stripes about the top of each of her perfect thighs. A natural waterfall of raven black curls cascaded down her back, almost to her waist. A pair of purple sunglasses rested on top of her head, and she wore black thonged sandals and carried a purple beach towel.

Boys' heads turned as she waved enthusiastically to her companions and hurried over to join Aya on the grassy terrace, spreading her purple towel out next to him and lying gracefully down on it, propping herself up on one elbow and turning to look at him. Aya, the book resting quite forgotten on his lap, could only stare at the lovely young girl lying next to him. Her slender body was bathed in the afternoon sunlight; it transfigured Rain, burnishing her tanned skin so she looked as if she had been carved out of amber, or even cast in solid gold.

As he gazed, Aya's eyes were drawn to something hideously out of place, and only just managed not to gasp: a long, narrow line of scar tissue defiled the smooth line of the flesh at her lovely left hip, trailing down to the top of her thigh. A closer look revealed a few finer scars just visible on her toned stomach and arms, and Aya had to struggle to keep himself from scowling in fury. Who could have inflicted such terrible injuries upon a lovely, sweet, vulnerable person like Rain? How could anyone abuse a girl so beautiful?

"Aya-san," she said with a smile. "Isn't it nice here? You choose the best spots."  
"Hn," was all Aya said. And he tried to take refuge in his book again, though Rain noticed that he had blushed slightly. She grinned mischievously.  
"Oi, Aya-san, don't be so antisocial!" She chided him gently, sitting up straight and folding her arms across her well-formed breasts. "Looking at you sat down there, anyone would think you didn't want to be out with me at all! You can read that book any time. Afternoons like this don't come often, and life is short."

Aya turned to her, raising his brows in surprise – no, more like familiarity. The lovely girl by his side had sounded so like Aya-chan there, it had almost made him shiver. Nobody else had possessed the nerve to chide him like that since she'd been gone, but Rain was different. She had done something he'd thought only his sister could ever do to him and made it look effortless. He had to admit it, it was rather refreshing. He rather liked it. He heard himself saying, "I suppose you're right, Rain." He felt a smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

Rain simply beamed in response, the smile lighting up her gently tanned face. Her amethyst optics shone.

Youji – and more than a few of the other young men present, regardless of the angry or jealous glances of their girlfriends – looked daggers at Aya; Rain was smiling up at the stoic redhead, gently prying the book from his grasp and placing it down next to them. Ken muttered something under his breath and wandered off to the poolside where Manx, barely less eye-catching in her elegant one-piece, had been watching the display from near the diving boards.

"See?" He muttered, flopping down next to her and attracting no small amount of funny looks himself.  
Manx nodded. "Is she always like this?" She asked disbelievingly. "I have no idea why you haven't murdered her yet… and look at that tan."  
"Tan?" Ken blinked. "She's pale."  
"Right now, she's easily darker than you," Manx pointed out. Ken glanced at Rain over his shoulder, raised his eyebrows in understated surprise – she was right. "There's something strange going on here, Siberian. No woman should attract that much attention from men she's never met just by walking out a door, no matter how beautiful she thinks she is. I thought the four of you had different tastes in women."  
"We used to, and then we met Rain."  
"Persia," Manx said tangentially. "Three of you. Several dozen young men here, a lot of whom appear to be here with their girlfriends. And from what you've been telling me, it sounds like most of Omi's male classmates are after her, too. She's certainly charismatic."  
"But that's just it," Ken said, staring out moodily across the crowded pool. A group of teenage boys, dripping water, hurried past him on the way to the diving boards. One of them was Omi and Ken wondered if he was showing off on the boards for Rain's sake. He could have told Omi, no, told all of them to save their energy. "She isn't. She's way too pretty to be true and goes dramatically quiet every time you ask her about her past, but there's nothing else there. Youji's charismatic. So are you. Her, though? No way."  
"She's not an interesting person?"  
Ken flicked a desiccated twig off a corner of Manx's fluffy white towel. "Have you ever tried to talk to her?"  
"Well, not really…"  
"You should try it," he said gloomily. "She's goddamn boring and thinks the entire goddamn world revolves around her and her vaguely-defined legitimate angst—look, now Aya's getting up."  
"Aya's going to come in?" Manx asked, pulling her sunglasses down her nose to regard Ken over the top of them, arching her brows comically. "Will wonders never cease?"  
Ken sighed and pushed himself to his feet, dusting a bit of poolside dirt from the back of his shorts. "If anyone needs me, I'll be over there drowning myself."

Manx hardly blamed him. It was one surefire way of getting out of Rain's gruesome company.

She let him go, pushing her sunglasses back up her nose to allow her to watch him covertly. He didn't bother joining the knot of daredevil boys in the queue for the boards, simply diving in from the side with absolutely no fuss at all and vanishing beneath the water for so long Manx had time to wonder if he was making good on that threat, only to surface a surprising distance away as if nothing had happened. Oh, so it had been a nineteen year old version of a breath-holding contest. Well, teenage boys were always teenage boys, even if Manx had no idea who Ken thought he was showing off for.

At least it wasn't for Rain: there was that much to say for it. Turning, Manx caught sight of the bikini-clad girl waiting by the changing rooms, and watched. Watched as she fell into step beside Aya (now clad in a pair of black swimming briefs and an unbuttoned shirt) on her way down to the pool. Watched as, after Aya abandoned the shirt and climbed without ceremony into the water, Rain chided him for being no fun, hurrying over to the high boards at the far end of the pool.

The boys by the boards, surprised to see the girl they had been trying to impress arrive among them, fell back to let her pass. Omi – by sheer mischance the person on the springboard at that moment – hurriedly stepped off, retreating back to the far end of the platform and letting Rain climb onto the board in his stead. She might have smiled, she might have spoken: for whatever reason Omi blushed, gazing after his gorgeous friend in something akin to consternation as she walked confidently to the end of the board. Heads turned; the boys clustered by the poolside turned to watch. The girls, utterly eclipsed by this daring beauty, turned away and began muttering venomously between themselves.

Manx just watched. Rain bounced on the balls of her feet once, twice, three times, her curls flying about her. She managed, somehow, to make even this look somehow graceful and dignified – and then she leapt into the air as if she were about to take flight, executing a faultless back somersault at the apex of her jump and then, straightening, dived gracefully into the pool with only the subtlest of splashes.

And surfaced right by Aya, her eyes shining with excitement, pearls of water glistening on her shapely bronzed limbs and clinging to her perfect breasts. She wasn't out of breath and her tangled curls, shining in the afternoon sun as if bedecked with diamonds, didn't even look as if they had gotten wet…

Maybe it wasn't a crime to be too perfect to be believable but, Manx thought, it ought to be.

No doubt about it, there was something not quite right with that girl. The only question, when everything about her was quite flawless, was what?


	8. Beauty and Stupid

"Pale," Manx said cryptically as Rain stepped from the changing rooms.

She was already used to the way heads turned as the beautiful young girl headed unhurriedly across the lobby to join them, as if Rain had absolutely no idea that five other people had been waiting impatiently for her to show her face for the last fifteen minutes. She was already used to the way conversation died, how Youji stopped trying to attract her attention in favor of staring at Rain, like a fourteen year old boy who'd just realized that actually, girls _didn't_ have cooties. She was no longer surprised by the way that even Aya looked distracted.

She was expecting the girls' jealously turned backs and spiteful sidelong glances, the way they started whispering behind their hands – _bitch, snob, slut, tramp, Americans are so trashy, probably a prostitute, who does she think she is?_ Expecting the men to stop what they were doing and stare, struck dumb and stupid by the presence of such unearthly beauty.

All she has to do is exist, Manx thought, and all the boys love her for it…

Rain _was_ pale, yes, and her hair hung loose and dead straight about her shoulders as if she had never got it wet. The tips of her razor-cut bangs were dyed, much like the ends of her hair, a deep purple, and a pair of pink and purple tinted sunglasses rested atop her head. She wore a pink, purple and white striped polo-neck tank top, over which she had buttoned a cropped black jacket, cut in such a way as to reveal her pale shoulders. Her full black short skirt had a design of a butterfly embroidered on it with silver thread. Below the lace hem of her skirt Rain had on sheer ripped stockings with black lacy tops. A pair of black calf-high socks with two purple stripes at the top and heavy black lace-up boots completed the ensemble. She wore a pair of chunky purple bracelets about her left wrist, a silver star necklace on a fine silver chain graced her slender throat and, in her left ear, she had placed a single long earring with a heart-shaped pendant at the end.

Going by the expression on his face Ken thought she looked utterly ridiculous. Manx, though she hated to take sides, had to admit that the boy had a point.

Pointedly adjusting the shoulder strap of her own print dress, the redhead gave Rain a narrow look which the girl pretended not to notice. Going by the slight smile that played across her lips, Rain had probably taken Manx's stare for jealousy… well, let her think what she wanted to think. Manx saw no reason to set her right.

"The Hell, Rain?" Ken said incredulously. "That wasn't what you were wearing when you came out!"

Rain simply looked at him. Flatly, uncomprehendingly, her beautiful face disbelieving. "But of course it's what I was wearing when I came out."  
"No it's not," Ken said simply, but with a kind of quiet conviction that was, in its own way, damning. "You had jeans on. And your hair was curly. What do you think you're playing at, Rain? What the fuck have you done – what are you doing to my friends?"  
"Ken-kun," Omi said warningly. "These stupid accusations are going a bit far—"  
"What do you mean, what am I doing?" Rain cut him off, her voice incredulous. "I'm not doing anything!"  
"Then why are you wearing that stupid goddamn outfit?" Ken demanded. "And why am _I_ the only one who remembers you weren't wearing it when you left the shop? Why have you _dyed your fucking hair_ , Rain?"  
"I haven't!" Rain cried in righteous indignation, her beautiful violet eyes brimming with sudden tears under her defiance. "How could I have done anything of the sort?"  
" _I_ don't know!" Ken shouted. "That's why I'm asking you! Why has your hair gone purple?"  
"It's always been purple! Why," Rain asked, her voice growing paradoxically quiet, "can't you trust me? Ken!"  
Ken laughed. "Trust you? Mother of _God_ , Rain, how am I supposed to trust you? I don't even know what you _look_ like!"

(And there were the boys, gazing at Rain in terrible empathy, but, Manx thought, what on Earth was with the women? The girls, the same girls who, bare seconds ago, had been turning their backs on Rain, gossiping maliciously with their friends about what she must have done to have so many boys chasing after her, were now staring between Rain and Ken in some dismay. _He's so mean. How could he yell at that poor girl? She's so cute!_ )

Rain didn't dignify that with a reply. Her eyes slipping as if by accident across Aya's shocked, pale visage, she gave Ken an enraged glance that had Ken backing up a pace and bracing himself – he remembered what had happened last time the girl looked at him with such naked fury – but this time her heliotrope eyes shone not with anger but with her own unshed tears. It was only by biting down hard that she was able to keep her lower lip from trembling. Even now, though, her unasked-for audience was left in no doubt as to her defiance. I won't cry, the look in her tear-filled, shining orbs was saying. I won't be seen to cry because of someone like you.

She said to Aya, _it would take more than that to hurt me now. Because I'm stronger than that by far._

To Ken, she said _because you are nothing_.

And she turned and fled from them, whipping free from Aya's grasp as the redhead reached out for her, slender fingers merely brushing her bare left shoulder. Ignoring the way Omi called her name. Come back, Rain… The great glass doors of the foyer swung silently to behind her. Heads turned as she ran blindly down the shallow flight of steps at the front of the building and across the busy road, two cars coming to a sudden screeching halt as the distressed girl darted out in front of them. Rain didn't seem to notice, didn't even break stride. Her slight figure was soon swallowed up by the late afternoon crowds.

"This is your fault."

Aya. Aya, fixing Ken with a look so poisonous it should by rights have struck the boy dead. Death, Ken thought, would have been preferable. At least it would have been a reprieve from Aya's eyes, from the naked fury they contained. Sure, he and Aya had their disagreements, some of them fairly serious, but he'd never come in for a look like that. Ken didn't think he'd ever seen Aya look like that when confronted by anything that wasn't a target or a Takatori or both. In the context of a Hidaka and a housemate who Aya should have known better than to introduce into the equation in the first place, it seemed rather an overreaction.

" _My_ fault?" Ken demanded. Without really meaning to, he glanced at Youji, and then at Manx. The young woman simply sighed wearily, shaking her head as if she could hardly believe Ken hadn't seen this coming. "What'd _I_ do?"  
"How _could_ you be so cruel to Rain?"

He turned away, erasing Ken with the contemptuous turn of his back. And then he was off and running too.

"Ken," Youji said.

* * *

Sunset. He caught up with her in a small park, almost deserted due to the hour. For a single horrible moment, back there on the streets, Aya had thought he'd lost the girl altogether until – his heart leaping – he'd spotted a familiar lithe figure in the distance, ducking through the gates and into the quiet park.

Suddenly energized, calling out the shapely girl's name, Aya redoubled his pace, pushing past a startled couple in high-school uniforms and nearly knocking the boy down, scattering a cooing clutter of pigeons, tearing across the scuffed, stubbled grass and through the middle of a group of small boys playing a scratch soccer match on a pitch which existed only by virtue of a few piles of bags and coats marking out goalposts, a number of whom stopped what they were doing to gaze after him in some confusion. All, to Aya, were equally irrelevant. All he could think of was Rain.

There. He stopped short, struggling to catch his breath.

" _Rain_!"

Sat on a swing in the deserted play area, the lovely young girl was gazing abstractedly into nothing at all, a gentle breeze gently tangling her long, purple-streaked midnight-black hair. One pale hand, holding her hot-purple iPod, rested lightly her lap, the other held the chain of the swing. She wasn't crying, but tear tracks scored her alabaster cheeks and her beautiful face was set in an expression of unutterable sadness. Her amethyst occuli, which normally sparkled with life and playfulness, were dulled with melancholy.

The girl hadn't heard him approach. Lost in her own world, one leg outstretched to allow her to slowly swing back and forth, Rain let her mind wander with the music. She had forgotten herself so completely she was singing along with it in a voice like that of a mourning angel, a voice which betrayed how much the beautiful young girl had suffered in her short lifetime.

He knew it was wrong to watch her like this but for a moment Aya could only stand and stare, enchanted by her angelic face and the captivating power of that beautiful, sorrowful voice.

"Without a soul," she was singing, soft and low and mournful, "my spirit's sleeping somewhere cold. Until you find it there and lead it back… Home. Wake me up inside, wake me up inside…"

The girl's exquisitely lovely voice, the heartbreaking sorrow in her big lavender eyes and the mournful look on her sweet face as she sung those evocative words made Aya shiver. It sounded as if Rain had been singing her sad song just for him, hoping against all expectation that he would hear her calling, come and rescue her from the darkness she was lost in and lead her back to light and to life. Lead her back to love.

"Rain," he breathed again, his own amethyst eyes full of warmth and compassion.

As if she had, felt his eyes on her, or somehow sensed his waiting presence, the young girl slowly raised her head and looked up, her voice tailing off as a rose-tinted flush bloomed across those pale, tear-streaked cheeks. A look of desperate embarrassment and pain flitted across her face, to be replaced by a look of sudden anger and resolve. Tearing off her earphones with one hand, Rain sprung to her feet in one sudden, elegant motion, one hand tightly clutching the iPod and the other balled into an angry fist. Aya had followed her!

"Go away!" she cried, her angry orbs blazing her furious defiance. "How dare you!"  
Aya took a pace back, surprised by her sudden anger. "Rain?" he said tentatively, one hand outstretched toward her. "What's wrong? Why are you—?"  
"How _dare_ you!" the girl cried again, breathless with indignation. "How _could_ you _stalk_ me like this? Do you have no respect for my privacy? I would have expected this kind of selfishness from a playboy like Youji—" Her eyes flashed scornfully as she said the young man's name: a player like that _would_ presume his very presence would be enough to make her forget Ken's callous allegations. She wasn't like all the empty-headed bimbos that blonde flake normally chose to pursue; she could never be fobbed off with a meaningless kiss! "—but you… _you_ , Aya! I thought you would have had more decency!"

Aya opened his mouth to retort, but found he couldn't speak. The girl's words had silenced him completely. It had never even occurred to him that Rain might not have wanted to see a friend of the boy who had so abused her, and so soon after the insult. He had been presumptuous, desperately so, in coming after her.

"I…" He let his hand fall, lowering his head in shame. "… I understand. I'm sorry."  
"And so you should be!" Rain retorted. "How am I supposed to respect you if you won't even respect my privacy? If you'll… if you'll _stalk me_ like, like a…" Her words were angry, but her voice shook slightly and she broke off, a haunted look creeping back into her eyes. Aya knew that look, and to see it on Rain's face made his heart ache. She shivered, folding her arms across her chest and hugging herself as if she were cold. "How could you?" she said, and now she sounded horrified, as if she had forgotten he was there – no, as if she were seeing someone quite different. "I thought I was – that I could…"

It was all too much for Aya. Though the redhead could be a little cold he wasn't heartless, especially not where girls were concerned. He reached out and clutched Rain firmly by the shoulders, pulling the delectable and delicate femme in front of him into his strong arms. Gasping, she tried to pull away, but his grasp was too strong. She could only gaze up at him in helpless fury at the presumption of this man – but God, the look in his violet eyes! He looked so angry, and – hurt? She had never seen the icy Aya gaze at anything with even a fraction the passion with which he was now gazing on her. She felt a crimson flush rise to her face.

"Rain," he said in a low, charged voice, "that's enough! It's not like that! I could _never_ have wanted to harm you!" Quite the opposite. How could he tell this girl – could he tell Rain that he had come after her only because he wanted to see that she was okay? That, in a few short weeks, she had already made it onto the short list of people he would die to protect? "I just wanted you to come back quickly! I was worried. We were all worried, Rain! I never want to see you hurt as badly as you were when I found you, not when I – we can protect you. I promise we can protect you."  
Rain gazed up at Aya in confusion, eyes wide and lips slightly parted. What – why was he saying such strange things to her? Why, when she could have easily killed any man who dared to try and touch her, couldn't she push him away and free herself from the snare of his arms? Why was her heart pounding in her chest? "But…" she stammered, "But Aya, I thought… your friend…"  
" _Forget_ Ken! He's not important!"  
"How can you say that?" The girl demanded, her violet orbs flashing as she pressed back against his firm chest, struggling feebly to break free of the inadvertent, unasked-for embrace. "How can you value me over your friends? How _can_ you want me to come back? I'm just a burden to you, Aya! I'm—"  
"Ran," Aya said, his voice husky, passionate… loving? "My name is Ran."

Two seconds later Rain and Aya were entangled in a passionate, flaming lip-lock.

* * *

"Do you think I'm going crazy?" Ken asked Manx an hour later.

It had, of course, been Rain's idea to go ice skating. Let's do something _American_ , she had said eagerly, when she and Aya rejoined their teammates by the entrance to the pool. As opposed, Ken had wondered, to what – tea ceremony? That fussy ikebana Aya had picked up from God knew where and might as well not have bothered for all the interest there was in it? I saw an advert in the papers this morning – let's all go ice skating! Omi had been delighted with the idea, shyly confessing that he'd been wanting to take Rain to the skating rink himself… Hell, even Aya had been keen. Leaving Ken, who'd been rather hoping they'd go see a movie and thus be spared the thankless task of socializing with one another, with no choice but to grudgingly acquiesce.

(She'd mentioned, just briefly, something about going skating with her younger brother, who'd – then broken off, giving Omi's pert profile a brief, troubled glance then lapsing into another of her equally troubled silences. It was the first thing any of them had heard about a younger brother.)

"We're all going to skate, aren't we?" Rain had said when they reached the ticket booth.

Aya had been about to answer for all of them when Ken presented his soccer tutees, preparing for an upcoming tournament, with all the frantic triumph of a man playing a Get Out of Jail Free card. Besides, his idea of a good time did not involve spending two hours falling on his ass. (Someone else could be the comic relief and foil to Rain's obscene perfection.)

Manx sat out likewise. She was, after all, the only other attractive young woman in the party, and she had made no secret of her quiet distaste for Rain's company. Any attempt to compete with the girl in any way, shape or form would, Manx was sure, only lead to her being effortlessly outclassed and, inevitably, humiliated – the more publicly the better. The only thing she could do (if she wanted to avoid looking like a jealous, conniving witch who couldn't stand being eclipsed by Rain, Earth-dwelling goddess that she was) was keep a low profile and quietly observe: that, as it turned out, was more than enough to keep her occupied.

Youji, discretion as ever being the better part of admitting he didn't actually like ice skating, immediately inserted himself into a bouquet of college girls hovering by the rink wall and began to Make An Impression. He was just about good enough on the ice to drift idly round the edge of the rink with his arm about a girl, and once he'd finished here that was all he'd have to do. Omi, much to his own relief, discovered he was a natural, was in no danger of making an utter spectacle of himself, and was actually rather enjoying himself. Aya of course turned out to have gone skating before.

Rain, no less predictably, could easily have competed professionally.

All of which conspired to leave Ken, who'd once borrowed his sister's roller skates and spent half an hour discovering new and interesting ways of falling down before getting bored and going to watch _Gundam_ , extremely glad he was quite literally sitting this one out. Not that he minded, when it meant a chance to compare notes with Manx without anyone else butting in.

Rain, though she was being sugar-sweet to him in front of the others, had smirked openly at him as Aya, hovering protectively over her with one arm an inch or so above her shoulders – which was about as close as the redhead was ever going to get to a public display of affection without Darkness Descending Upon Them All – guided her out onto the ice. The look in her eyes was obscenely triumphant: just for a moment, she didn't look pretty at all. _Well, didn't our little plan backfire._

Nobody else appeared to have seen a thing.

(But Ken had forgotten, and Rain had never known, that Youji noticed far more than he would ever let on.)

"Maybe I am crazy," Ken said, idly agitating the tea he hadn't wanted when he ordered it with the spoon he hadn't needed. "It would explain a lot, right? I could have sworn she didn't have a skirt on or any of that purple crap in her hair when we left, but nobody else seems to think it's weird…"  
"You're not crazy," Manx said with a sigh. She sat hunched over, a mug of coffee in both hands and her fingers spread to get the warmth. "I clearly remember her hair being longer than that by the poolside, and her skin was tanned. That degree of change… well, it's improbable but not entirely impossible, even in the time she had. What is impossible is that it should go entirely unremarked."  
"But nobody _is_ remarking on it." Ken replied simply. "And when I do, they act like I'm nuts."

Dropping the spoon, he sat back in his chair and looked out across the rink, to where Rain stood with Aya and Omi. She appeared to be talking Omi through some minor point of technique while Aya stood by and watched. She placed her slender hands, now encased in a pair of black leather gloves, on the boy's shoulders and gently coaxed him to straighten his back. Omi had colored slightly, an uncertain smile on his face. Ken couldn't see Rain's own face, but he could imagine her kindly smile.

Ken had no difficulty finding her entire performance repellant, and Omi's willingness to be gently patronized nauseating. Pulling a face, he turned back to his tea, gazing intently into it as if he had seen a slowly circling shark's fin poking up above the surface.

Manx placed her coffee down on the table before her, sitting back in her chair. "Do you want my opinion, Ken?"  
"Huh?" Ken started, raising his head as if he were surprised to still see her there. "Sure I do."  
"I suspect that's exactly what she's counting upon."  
"She's counting on me going mad?"  
Manx permitted herself a small, fleeting smile. "Not entirely. She's counting on your team thinking you are. Before I saw her in action, I suspected she was planning on infiltrating, then betraying Weiss. But now… from the way she's treating you in particular, I'm sure that's not what she was sent for."  
"Me?" Ken blinked at her. "What do you think now?"  
"That's obvious," the young woman said. Quite calm. "Rain is trying to destroy you. And she'll manage it, if nothing changes."  
"What?"

You heard, Hidaka. Rain is going to destroy Weiss.

It was absurd. Impossible. For better or worse Weiss were a team: they were better than that. Surely after all this time, the fighting and killing, the narrow escapes and the near-death experiences, all the I-watch-your-back-you-watch-mine-so-nobody-dies, they had become better than that. Stronger. It would take more than a woman to pull them apart, right? They'd battled dark beasts both metaphorical and literal together, they'd escaped from the buildings that always seemed to end up blowing up or collapsing around them together… Hell, they'd sold flowers to teenage girls with unfathomable hormone complexes together and still managed to refrain from murdering one another in their sleep, though Ken had to admit he'd come pretty damn close to it where Aya was concerned…

And enter Rain. Rain who, with little more than a flick of her artistically tangled shampoo-commercial hair and a come-hither look from her ridiculously purple eyes, was supposed to be the thing that tore them apart. Ridiculous. And yet… She and her poser-goth perfect wardrobe didn't look like any kind of nemesis to Ken. Unless, of course, she was supposed to annoy them all to lunacy or death, whichever came first.

"That's ridiculous," Ken said, and even as he said it he wondered what made it so bizarre.  
"You know what makes any team work, of course."  
"Trust."  
Manx nodded. He hadn't even had to think about it. "You have to admit, Ken, there's already a lot less trust between your teammates and yourself than there was before Rain showed her face. If things carry on the way they have been doing this evening, that girl is going to pull Weiss apart. Something's got to change."  
"What, though?" Ken asked urgently. Leaning forward. From a distance, he and Manx might have looked like lovers having a tiff – and no surprise, in a couple so wildly mismatched. "What can we – I mean, the others, we've got – but Rain, they'll tell… shit! _Shit_! It's just me, isn't it? I… this is _goddamn_ — I shouldn't…" Why do _I_ have to do this? He closed his eyes, just briefly, sighing in frustration. "Okay. Okay. What can I do?"  
"For now," Manx said, "nothing. At least, nothing to arouse her suspicions any further than they have been. I'm going to try and find out who sent her. I'll need you to report back to me about her behavior. Since Persia's her Number One Fan, our case is going to have to be absolutely watertight if we're going to get her out of Weiss and away from – oh, Lord."

A flash of purple-and-black had caught her eye; Manx and Ken turned in time to see Rain skate toward the clearer ice at the center of the rink, one leg stuck out behind her like a ham bone. Stopping just shy of dead center, the girl straightened, twisting a purple-hued lock of hair about one gloved finger, coloring charmingly. Then she hesitated, looking for a moment as if she were about to bolt. Her lips moved – _no, I can't do this!_ Omi grinned at her, calling out encouragingly: no doubt he had been the one to coax her into this performance. The wheeling crowds about the edge of the rink, guessing something was about to happen, turned their heads, falling silent.

Whatever Olympic-standard piece of flash Rain was due to perform, Manx thought she could live without seeing it.

* * *

Another crowded venue, another pounding, bass-heavy pop tune. Another circle of admiring young men gathered about a slender girl clad in black and purple, an angelically beautiful girl whose willowy grace and obvious curves betrayed her foreign blood and whose long raven hair with lilac streaks swirled about her as she danced, eyes closed, in the middle of the crowd. Lost in her own world, she danced like a dream, entirely oblivious to their admiring glances.

They might as well, Ken reflected, not have bothered leaving the skating rink. The only difference was he'd lost Manx: the woman, pleading pressure of work, had left after dinner.

Any minute now, he thought, some drunk pervert would accost Rain so she could prove she wasn't just a pretty face by administering a needlessly vicious verbal and physical beatdown. Not like a bastard like that wouldn't have had it coming, but far better to have it coming from the cops than from Miz Wonderful. What would she do, really? She'd just piss the guy off, make it go all the harder for the far less special girl they cornered next, who wouldn't be able to fight free…

The tune changed and Rain stopped dancing, shaking out her hair and opening her eyes. A crimson blush spread across her cheeks as she noticed the applauding crowd gathered about her, and it was not a flush of exertion. Blushing to the roots of her hair, the girl muttered an 'excuse me' and ducked off into the dancing throng, over toward Aya. Never one for dancing, the redhead had colonized a cluster of upholstered chairs and sofas in the corner of the room. Ordinarily Ken, who didn't much like dancing either, would have joined him, but tonight that would have meant Rain. So he'd stayed away.

He might as well not have bothered coming out at all. All he'd got from it was damp hair and the beginnings of a headache.

Across the room, a drunk pervert had accosted Rain.

"Hi there, beautiful," he said, placing one hand on her upper arm, utterly ignoring Aya's scowl as the redhead got to his feet, muscles tensed for action. "Saw you dancing. You look like you're pretty wild. How about you come and have fun with us?" And, as his friends laughed drunkenly, he leered openly, trying to pull her over toward him. She shuddered in disgust.  
"How about no?" Rain said crisply, pushing him away. "Sorry, not interested." And she tried to pull away, but the drunkard's friends closed in about her, separating her from Aya. "Hey, I said I wasn't—" She broke off as the man curled an arm about her lithe form, pulling her to his chest. "Get off!"  
"What's the problem?" One of the friends asked maliciously. "We'll show you a far better time than Red over there."  
"You're American?" The pervert bent toward her, his beer-laden breath hot against Rain's pale cheek, backing her against the wall. "I love American girls. They're so spirited." And, rubbing his body against hers, he placed one hand on her breast. The girl cried out in shock, her eyes going wide.

Aya shouted Rain's name and tried to force his way toward the corner the girl had been trapped in, but unbeknownst to any of these men, they had picked entirely the wrong girl to try and harass. Years of training came to Rain's rescue and, breaking free of the man's embrace, the lovely young girl drove one knee into his gut and, as he doubled over, followed it up with a fist to his face, neatly breaking the pervert's nose and sending him flying to the sticky floor. His companions fell back, gazing in awe-struck shock at the slight young girl who had so effortlessly decked their muscular boss, stood with one heavy boot pressed to the back of his neck, her beautiful lavender eyes blazing with fury.

"Pig," she spat contemptuously. "How dare you touch me like that!"

Ken decided to go home. He was most of the way to the door when he realized he'd abandoned his jacket on the couch beside Aya and would have to go back and get it if he didn't fancy trying to sleep on the balcony. Sighing, he turned and pushed his way back through the crowds toward Aya and the couch, and was mildly relieved to note, by the time he got there, that Rain was nowhere to be seen and Aya had been joined by Omi.

"Where's Rain?" he asked, more out of duty than any real desire to know the answer.  
Omi shrugged. "She said she wanted a drink… are you going already? You're coaching tomorrow?"  
"Come on, Omi," Ken said as he stooped to retrieve his stray jacket and swung it casually over his shoulder, "I'm damn near always coaching tomorrow. See you."

It was a relief to get outside. Hesitating in the entryway of the club to pull on his jacket, murmuring a distracted _good night_ to the bored young woman on the door, Ken took a deep breath of the colder, comparatively cleaner city air and breathed a sigh of relief, closing his eyes. He wasn't wild about the walk to the station or catching the subway home – and Christ, what a rotten evening it had turned out to be! Knowing his luck, he'd get soaked as well – but God, it felt good to get out of that place and away from the smoke, the noise, and the godawful music. Not to mention the company. Bad enough when it was just his team, but it was far, far worse watching an entire club's worth of people transforming into little more than communicants in the First Church of Rain Akegata.

Which made Ken a heretic who'd just taken another big step toward getting burned at the stake.

Folding his arms and wrapping his jacket more tightly about him, Ken set off for the subway station. He needed some time alone. Needed some time to think. Rain was going to destroy them all and he could barely even make himself believe it…

Do nothing, Manx had said, but he'd gone too far already to avoid arousing that woman's suspicions. That smile, back at the rink, had told him that much. Rain knew it was open war: worse, she clearly knew that she was winning. Never mind watching Rain, he was getting the distinct feeling he was going to have to watch himself. That girl clearly had plans for Weiss's future, and those plans clearly didn't involve the irrepressible Agent Siberian.

Where's Rain? Said she wanted a drink… Rain couldn't have known he was planning on leaving, could she – _she is tele-empathic,_ Manx said coolly, all her attention on the sheaf of papers in her hands – but of course she could. Tempting fate, this walk home; Ken wasn't a professional for nothing. But if she _were_ to try anything (Ken walked far too slowly, head down and hands safely tucked in his pockets, and told himself – the picture of dreamy abstraction – he was merely cold and sleepy and disinclined to hurry) if he'd been _attacked_ , even if it were her word against his…

You can't prove anything if you're dead, Hidaka. But surely, something inside him said – hope, for Ken, springing as always eternal – she wouldn't risk that. It'd be too obvious, there'd be too many questions. She's no idiot and I'd settle for getting me out the way.

(Quite the gambler, aren't you, Siberian?)

Weiss, Ken thought stubbornly, were my team first.

Felt something snap out and catch at his throat, wrapping itself painfully about it. He gasped and stumbled, head snapping backward; he wasn't even surprised. Ken clawed at his throat, gasping, twisted his head in a desperate attempt to see over his shoulder. Saw – and hardly knew what he'd expected – saw _women_. Little girl clutching a toy and smiling at nothing, a sweet, brainless little smile; a flash of blonde hair… and, leaning against the wall half-hidden in shadow, the figure of a tall, curvaceous young woman clad in black and purple. A woman with long dark hair, and the face of a marble angel.

" _Got you_ ," Ken said faintly, and smiled.

And a sudden motion, the hiss of fabric against fabric, a single moment of exquisite pain. And nothing but darkness.


	9. You Look Like an Angel But I Got Wise

Rain screamed.

Thunder cracked overhead, as if the skies were being torn open.

Which was why it was fortunate that Youji, who had slipped away from the club and his friends in search of a little alone time, showed up when he did.

It would have been easy enough for Youji to find a pretty, pliant young girl, drape one arm about her shoulder, and let what happened next happen: that had been why he hadn't done it. He needed to think. He needed a quiet cigarette and a few moments alone with his thoughts, not willful oblivion in the arms of a woman whose name he could barely remember. Time to think, that was the key.

No chance of that now. There, framed in the narrow mouthway of a side street, were two figures he would have known anywhere. There was Rain, eyes wide and terrified, hands to her mouth, stood spotlighted by a guttering streetlamp: there was Ken, lying unmoving on the rain-speckled ground with one hand to his throat, surrounded by the women of Schreient. A nod from the leader, the tall, grim-faced brunette Youji knew as Hell, and crazy Schoen was prowling toward his fallen teammate, her whip held taut between her hands.

"Shit," Youji muttered, gritting his teeth as he reached for the wire concealed inside his watch—

—just in time to see Rain spring forward, her slender arms outstretched and her generous bosoms heaving wildly, to throw herself in the blonde woman's path. Schoen stopped short, her ferocious blue gaze suddenly full of confusion, as she gazed at the slight young girl who stood protectively over Ken's unconscious body like an angry tigress guarding her wounded cubs. The slender, shapely beauty was little more than a child, and yet strength and determination seemed to radiate from her delicately curved form. Her eyes, full of angry amethyst fire, narrowed fiercely.

"Leave us alone!" she cried. "Don't think you've won so easily!"  
"Well, well, if it isn't little Serenity," Hell purred, her narrow eyes glinting maliciously behind her glasses as she gazed at Rain. "My, haven't you grown. Your father would pay us very well for the knowledge of _your_ current whereabouts."

Rain gasped, fists unclenching slightly, her eyes going wide.

"Don't _call_ him that! That man is _not_ my father!"  
"He is your father by law, Serenity, and by law, he has every right to come and take you," Hell said, casting an appreciative look at the young girl, her wet clubbing clothes clinging intimately to every curve of her lithe form. "Of course, I'm sure if he had you back _now_ , your father wouldn't let you out of his sight so easily!"

Smirking evilly, Hell stepped forward and reached for Rain, grabbing her roughly beneath the chin with one gloved hand and running her thumb over the swell of the girl's lower lip.

Jerking her head free, Rain growled and made to swing for the older woman's smirking face, but a whip cracked and wrapped itself about her wrist, holding it pinned an inch or two from Hell's jaw. Out of the corner of her eyes, the young girl could see the crazy blonde woman smirking cruelly at her; before Rain could tell the blonde skank what she thought of her, there was a soft _click_ and the murderous spike of Tot's umbrella was grazing against her throat.

"Rain!"

 _Aya_.

Aya and Omi skidded to a halt at the alleyway's entrance, stopping short at the sight of the lovely young girl they had come to care for surrounded by a knot of angry, murderous-looking women they all knew only too well. Hell smiled.

"Looks like your friends have come to see you off," she smirked. "What a pity you won't get to kiss poor Aya goodbye."  
Rain spat in her face. "I'm not going anywhere, you bitch! That bastard has nothing to do with the woman I've become!"  
Hell laughed loud and long, eyes closed, shoulders shaking. "Really?" she retorted. "Do you _really_ think that? Do you truly believe you'd be even half the woman you are _without_ your father's help? Oh, no, little Serenity. You're the most valuable asset your father ever had, the most brilliant success the Blutige Engel Project saw! He'll never let you go!"

Rain said nothing, but her eyes narrowed dangerously. Aya called her name, starting toward her; Omi reached inside his jacket for a concealed dart, but before the boy could get a clear shot in, Rain had _moved_. Rearing suddenly backward, Rain kicked away Tot's umbrella, knocking it from the blue-haired girl's hands and sending it spinning to the paving. Tot cried out in pain, leaping away and nursing her sore wrist, as Rain grabbed Schoen's whip with her free hand, dragging the startled blonde toward her and driving one knee into her solar plexus, knocking her to the floor where she landed, with a splash, in a muddy puddle.

"Pathetic," Rain sneered at the stupid blonde, unwrapping the end of the woman's whip from about her wrist and tossing it at her. "Someone as weak as you has no right to even handle a weapon!"

She stepped back, head proudly erect, her fists raised, and shook a hank of tangled, violet-streaked tresses, hung heavy with rainwater, from her pale face. Her father had seriously thought a pathetic bunch of skanks like _these_ would be able to take her on? What a joke!

"My name is Rain!" she cried. "Not Serenity! And you can tell my father I walk alone!"  
"How sweet," Hell sneered. "Tot, we're leaving. Neu, get Schoen."

The last Schreient member, who had remained silent and detached throughout, simply nodded, hefting her dazed and groaning teammate into her arms. Her eyes, barely visible behind her visor, flickered briefly over Rain: it might not have been noticeable to anyone else but to Youji it seemed she frowned. Something about her hinted only at her confusion. Neu – or so Youji fancied – didn't understand what she was witnessing, still less why her team should care…

"We'll be seeing you," Hell said, with a wicked smirk. "Take care of yourself… _Serenity_."

And then the women were gone, disappearing back down the alleyway and melting back into the night as if they had never been there at all, leaving Rain staring into the darkness in desperate hate, one hand clasped to her shoulder. A trickle of bright crimson blood ran from between her slender fingers and down her cool, rainwater-damp skin to seep into the fabric of her little black jacket. She seemed to tremble, all energy spent, as if any minute her legs would give way beneath her, sending her slumping to the ground.

"Rain!" Aya cried, running over to her side and catching her by the shoulders. "Rain, are you all right?"

Omi's eyes widened at the sight of his usually stoic teammate losing his cool over Rain. She had been around a bare few weeks, and already this girl was melting the icy walls about his friend's heart. Maybe Rain would be the girl who would bring Aya out of his frozen shell, help him step away from the horrors of his past and teach him to live not for a comatose girl, but for a woman who was alive and beautiful and vibrant and the future that, one day, maybe they could face together. Tucking the dart back into his case, Omi hurried over to Rain's side, gazing up at her in concern. Aya smiled down at her, resting his hands upon her shoulders.

(And Youji, muttering to himself in a dark and sarcastic undertone, none-too-gently hefted Ken's unconscious form onto his back, stumbling slightly as he straightened, struggling to take the boy's weight.)

"Rain," Aya was saying, his voice gentle and his eyes full of concern, "what happened?"  
Rain shuddered. Raising her head, she gazed at Aya from behind a curtain of wet hair, her dark, tangled, locks framing her bruised and pallid face and her eyes full of distant sorrow, and for a long while she was silent. When she finally spoke, her voice was so quiet it was hard to hear over the gentle plashing of the rain, and the distant purr of traffic. "I… I don't know," she said, her voice shaking slightly. "I just stepped out for some air, and… and they came for me, and he – your friend – he tried to stop them even though I told him not to, and… oh God, Aya, I was so scared…"  
"It's okay, Rain," Aya said, strong hands tightening about her upper arms as he gazed into her amethyst orbs, noticing with a pang of distress that her eyes were swimming with unshed tears. "You're safe with us." Smiling reassuringly, Omi nodded his agreement, dabbing at Rain's bleeding shoulder with a folded handkerchief.  
"But why attack you?" Youji asked. "If they wanted to abduct you, why didn't they take you once Ken was down?"  
" _I_ don't know!" Rain cried, suddenly angry. "I… I'm just a regular girl, Youji! I don't know why they'd think I…" She broke off, a single crystalline tear trickling slowly down one of her pale cheeks to mix with the rainwater. "I'm not the girl they think I am," she stammered, wiping at her eyes. "Not any more! I'm not!"

Aya could bear it no more. He pulled the girl to him, letting her collapse into his arms. Rain's frail body shook with sobs as she slumped against him, burying her head into his broad chest.

"Let's get you home," Aya whispered into her wet, tousled locks.  
"While we're at it," Youji muttered, "let's hope Ken's still breathing, hey?"

* * *

Honestly? He didn't understand how Ken had borne it.

For Youji, suspicion had been born on the night of Calico's first mission. There'd been nothing, at that stage, that he could really define, still less put into words. Nothing concrete. Just a nagging feeling that something wasn't right here: doubt, fidgeting and rustling and scrabbling about at the back of his mind, backward and forward, like a mouse in a skirting-board.

Doubt. Irritating and impossible to ignore, scratching and fussing as he lounged on his usual chair in his usual corner and watched the girls, or as he lay in bed, eyes closed, searching futilely for sleep. The feeling that he shouldn't have ever been so willing to take Rain's word for it over Ken's, shouldn't be banking on a woman he barely knew over a teammate he trusted, quite literally, with his life: a boy who couldn't even _spell_ 'mendacity' still less successfully practice it. He'd been perfectly willing to trust Ken's instincts until Rain arrived. Ken was Ken and a terrible judge of human nature, who didn't like to believe the worst about anybody unless he'd seen proof. That one didn't take against people _just because_.

Quiet and careful and sly, trying not to let on that he was doing anything of the sort, Youji had watched her. Rain had caught him, once or twice, but from the look in her eyes she had mistaken meticulous scrutiny for frank admiration…

And then there'd been their night on the town, and that little scene in the alleyway.

It wasn't a mouse in the skirting. It was a goddamn capybara.

End result: Youji felt as if he had been rudely awakened from a month-long dream, and not a particularly pleasant one at that, only to stumble blearily downstairs in search of coffee and a reality check and find out its central figure was flitting blithely about the place, as if she hadn't realized that dreams should end when the dreamer woke up.

"Good morning, Youji-san!"

For there was Rain, effortlessly co-opting Ken's niche as resident hausfrau and mother hen, stood by the stove in an apron and backless slippers cooking a hearty All-American breakfast of pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon and hash browns. The girl was wearing a tight v-necked tee in deep violet with black edging about the neckline and sleeves and a black pentagram printed on the front, over a long-sleeved black-and-white striped top, brief black shorts held up with a purple and white belt, and white and black striped socks that came to just above her knees. Her long, black curls were held back with a white ribbon – there was no trace, Youji couldn't help noticing, of the purple streaks from last night. No sign of any injury, either. He shook his head as if to clear it, and reached for his cigarettes.

"Don't smoke in the kitchen, please."

That was Aya, dressed all in black and sat at the table with the morning paper spread out before him. Omi perched next to him, sipping from a tumbler of orange juice and smiling broadly at nothing in particular. Youji sighed, looking mournfully at his unlit cigarette for a moment before tucking it back in its packet. Some days you just couldn't get arrested.

There was no sign of Ken.

"You shouldn't smoke at all!" Rain chipped in, gazing seriously at Youji over one shoulder. "Don't you think you should quit, Youji-san? You know smoking's bad! Also, it's unattractive. I could never like a man who smoked."  
It should have been offensive. Instead, it left Youji blinking. "You do know Aya smokes, right?"  
"No, he doesn't," Rain said. Hint of, _don't be ridiculous_.  
"Yes, he does."  
"I've never smoked," Aya said. "Stop trying to stir trouble, Kudou."  
It was on the tip of Youji's tongue to ask, _really?_ _When'd you quit?_ but that, he thought, would have been unwise. Don't rise to it, Kudou, you've better things to think about… "That's funny," he said, "there I was thinking he smoked those cigarettes he bummed off me when all the while he was saving me from myself. Why _Aya_ , I never knew you cared. Hang onto him, Rain, he's a catch."

Rain colored, a scarlet blush spreading across her pale cheeks to cross the bridge of her tip-tilted nose. She turned quickly back to the stove, ducking her head in a charmingly futile attempt to hide her embarrassment, furiously concentrating on stirring the scrambled eggs, then turning over the bacon as it hissed and spat in its pan. Aya, meanwhile, had suddenly become extremely interested in his newspaper.

"It's not like that!" Rain protested. "We barely know each other! We're just…"  
"Friends," Aya said quickly, apparently talking to an article on conservation in Kagoshima. "We're just friends." Rain nodded gratefully, smiling at him over her shoulder.  
"Well, I think it's cute you get on so well!" Omi said unexpectedly. "I think it'll be good for you both!"  
Rain smiled again, the flush creeping back to her cheeks. "Uh… breakfast's ready!" she cried cheerfully, laying sizzling rashers of bacon on four plates. "Have you guys ever had an American-style breakfast before? There's maple syrup for the pancakes, and there's more egg if you want it! Oh – do you reckon Ken-san would like to have something taken up?"

 _By me_ , she meant.

"I'll do it," Youji heard himself say. "You've worked hard enough."

* * *

Ken's room was dark. It was the kind of incomplete darkness that comes from drawing the curtains on the sun but, after the brightness of the day, it took a while for Youji's eyes to adapt to the low light, and even when they did there wasn't much to see. Just Ken, eyes closed, lying curled up beneath his tangled bedsheets with a warm ice pack lying on the pillow beside him. He raised his head slightly at the sound of the door opening, throwing one arm up to protect his eyes from the light that streamed through the open door.

So far so predictable. Whatever had gone on in that alleyway before the rest of them showed up, it had left Ken with an ugly weal about his throat and a lump on his head that felt about the size of a grapefruit even through his thick, dark hair. He hadn't even come round until they were halfway home and Omi, once he had torn his attention away from Rain and her mysteriously vanishing bloody arm, had diagnosed concussion and ordered him to bed. Honestly, Ken-kun, he'd scolded, you shouldn't be so reckless…

"How's your head?" Youji asked.

Ken just groaned, slumping back against his pillow wearily. He looked as if he'd have liked to curse his friend, toss the ice pack at him, or anything at all as long as Youji got the hint and left him alone: that he didn't even try told Youji as clearly as if Ken had shouted it that the question had been an extremely stupid one.

"Wow. That good, huh?"  
Now Ken _did_ heft the ice pack in Youji's general direction. "Fuck off, Youji."  
"I take it you don't want breakfast, then," Youji said, glancing down at the laden tray in his hands. "Rain's graced our table with an all-American extravaganza…"  
"I'm not hungry."

He was probably telling the truth. Poor kid probably felt quite ill enough already without trying to force down an American breakfast he probably wouldn't have had much interest in even if he'd been feeling on top of the world. American food was all very well in moderation, but not for breakfast and not all the time – and, aside from the cute bento lunches she constantly foisted on Omi, it seemed to be the only thing Rain made.

"So, uh, Ken…"  
Ken buried his head in the pillows. "Fuck _off_ , Youji!"  
"Okay, I'll keep it brief, then… what happened last night? Rain told Aya she was attacked by Schreient and you jumped in to stop them taking her and that's how _you_ got hurt, but I'm not sure I buy it. I don't think she was ever in real danger from them. Ken, _you_ were the one they were after, weren't you?"  
"She was there, Youji." Ken spoke to his pillows, his voice low and defeated-sounding. "Swear to God. She was there when they jumped me, like they _knew_ her. Like she was—"  
"Like she was with them," Youji finished. "I believe you, Kenken."

 _I believe you_ —for a moment Ken said nothing. Then, blinking and rubbing at his eyes with the heel of his hand, he raised his head, fighting against pain and dizziness to push himself up onto his elbows, from which position of power he gazed up at Youji in open confusion. Christ, Youji thought, how marginalized must Rain's advent have left Ken feeling that simply having one of his own teammates take his side against Rain's left him looking so perfectly baffled? Yeah, Ken, I believe you. She's trouble. I'm sorry.

"You _do_?"  
Youji sighed, slipping his hands into his pockets. "I saw it too. I don't know what that girl thinks she's after beneath it all but whatever it is, it's gonna cost us dear."  
"I thought you liked her." The boy spoke quite simply – but are you sure, the look in his eyes was saying, that you're not just pissed off with her because she's after Aya?  
"I thought I liked her, too. Guess I saw something in her that wasn't really there."  
Another man might have pressed the issue, but not Ken. "So you'll help us? Me and Manx, you'll help us get rid of her?"  
Youji nodded. "I'm in. She's got to be stopped."

When he left Ken's room five minutes later, Youji was whistling something that could have been the theme from _The Great Escape_ and, when he pitched the cooling all-American extravaganza in the dumpster at the back of the shop, covering it over with an armload of dead flowers and wrapping paper, it felt like a blow struck for liberty and truth.

* * *

Sunday morning. Sundays were always bad: the shop was crowded, as ever, with giggly little high school girls dressed up trim as if for dates. The occasional genuine customer braved the crowds to timidly buy a bouquet of one of Aya's rather fussy arrangements; a few regulars called in orders; a local restaurant asked for thirty-five small centerpieces to be collected on Wednesday. Youji barricaded himself behind the register and wished Ken were there instead of him.

An ordinary day – and yet Youji felt as if his eyes had been opened overnight. He noticed, as he had never done before, how very unpopular Rain seemed to be with some of the clientele. Though her presence seemed to have been accepted by many of them, at least half a dozen girls followed her every movement about the shop with unfriendly, jealous eyes, while others simply glared openly whenever she passed by. He noticed, too, that the store had gained an unexpected male element: a small knot of teenage boys stood near the door, gazing after Rain in the hope that the shapely beauty would spare them a glance, or a kind smile.

"She's from America," one of the boys whispered, "born October 31. Her favorite flowers are lilies."  
"I _thought_ she was foreign," his friend said. "She always looks so beautiful and exotic, she can't just be Japanese."  
"She's a straight-A student and she's really sweet and nice, but she's tough! I'd hate to get her mad."

Rain, oblivious to the stares she attracted, was stood by the table with her sleeves rolled to the elbows and her outfit covered by her lavender apron, holding an elegant bouquet of white flowers. Aya leaned over her shoulder, fussing with the blooms as he quietly explained how to fix the arrangement so that it wouldn't fall over when she let go. As he worked, his hands accidentally brushed against hers, causing a blush to creep to Rain's cheeks—

"Aya-san!"

Aya started, lifting his hands away from the flowers. His heart sank when he caught sight of Sakura. The girl was dressed ridiculously as always, wearing a prim pink jacket with heart-shaped buttons open over a tight white tee with a sugar-pink heart printed on the chest, a short pink skirt with white polka dots, knee socks and strappy high heels. She'd rounded the ensemble off with a hot-pink purse around one shoulder and a large ribbon tied in her short brown hair. It too was pink.

Just what, Youji wondered, did a shy little tomboy like Sakura want with pink high heels?

Sakura was attempting to give Rain an angry glare, but as soon as she realized that Aya was looking at her, she gave him a sickly-sweet simper. With an effort, Rain just about managed not to laugh in the preppy idiot's face. As if Aya could possibly have found a girl like _her_ attractive!

"Aya-san!" Sakura squealed again, her voice shrill and grating. "I haven't seen you in all of two days, honey! I've missed you so much! Have you been very busy teaching _her_ —" she gave Rain another ugly look, "—to arrange flowers? No offense, but she hardly looks the ladylike sort. You should have hired a _real_ woman, who appreciated delicacy of touch!"  
"Ladylike?" Youji echoed. Somewhere just out of sight, he heard Omi stifle a giggle, which hadn't been what he'd meant at all. Since when had Sakura cared about _that_? Hell, since when had she started acting so forward?  
Rain smiled back, sweetly, but her eyes were dangerous. "I assure you, Sakura, that I can be quite the lady when I choose to be. And believe me, a _real_ lady would never say anything so impolite about another."  
"Did you want something, Sakura?" Aya asked tightly. "Rain and I were in the middle of something."

Sakura, who had paled visibly at the ferocious look in Rain's eyes, struggling to hold her ground even as she shook with fear, recovered herself a little at being addressed by her idol. She barely noticed the frustration in his own voice, or the way his fingertips rested against the bare skin of Rain's pale forearm, as if to soothe her. Batting her eyes at Aya, Sakura gave him another sickly smile.

"I was wondering if Rain could help me with an arrangement," she said, her smile turning venomous. "It's for a friend."  
Rain sighed, but she supposed for the sake of their cover she would have to deal with the girl peaceably. "Of course I can, Sakura," she said wearily, exasperated by the thought of having to serve a stupid prep like her. "What's it called?"  
"I'm not sure if you'll have heard of it. It's called 'Hands Off My Aya-San, You Goth Slut, Or You'll Pay For It'."

The girls watching them gasped; a look of fury stole into Aya's beautiful violet eyes. The shop hushed as everyone turned to Rain, waiting to see how she would react – everyone, that was, save Youji. Youji stared at Sakura. This wasn't the quiet, awkward little track star he remembered. What the Hell _happened_ to her?

"I'm afraid we don't do that arrangement here," Rain replied, matching Sakura's venomous smirk with a sweet smile of her own, but naked anger blazed in her amethyst orbs as she stared down the preppy bitch. Suddenly frightened again, Sakura took a pace backward, realizing too late how much taller and stronger the beautiful American was than her. "I do know 'Aya Doesn't Like Stupid Little Preppy Whores And I'll Do What The Fuck I Want'. Would that be okay? If not, I guess could do 'If You Want A Fight I'll Give You One, Though You'll Only Be Beaten'. That's quite lovely at this time of year!"  
Youji laughed sardonically to himself. He murmured, "What's wrong with a lover's arrangement?"  
It could have broken the tension, if only Sakura had heard it: she simply cried, "Is that a _threat_?"  
"Well… yes," Rain said brightly, cracking her knuckles, "yes, it is. I'd be happy to fight if that's what you wanted, though we'll have to take it outside. I wouldn't want to break anything… except for _you_ , of course."  
Sakura flushed crimson with rage. "How _dare_ you, you bitch!" she shrieked, stepping forward and swinging wildly at Rain's face, her hand arcing forward to slap her about the face. Rain flinched, squeezing her eyes shut, preparing herself for the sudden explosion of stinging pain across her cheek… but it never came. Startled, her long, slender fingers reaching to press against still unblemished flesh, she opened her eyes again – and gasped at what she saw.

Aya had caught Sakura's wrist bare inches from connecting with Rain's cheek, and now held her firmly by her outstretched hand, glaring down at her in naked fury.

"Aya-san!" Sakura cried. "Y… you're hurting me!"  
"Get out," Aya said coldly, his grasp tightening about Sakura's wrist, making the girl wince.  
Sakura stared up at him in bewilderment. "But…" she began, "but, Aya-san, how _could_ you be defending that trashy little foreigner? She's so mean and slutty! She can't possibly compare to a proper lady… to someone like _me_!"  
"Get. Out," Aya spat, letting go of Sakura's wrist and thrusting the girl from him. She stumbled on her ridiculous heels and fell, landing heavily on her ass in a puddle of dirty water. She cried out, tears starting in her eyes, but Aya was unmoved. "How dare you?" he shouted. "Rain's a thousand times the woman you are! How _dare_ you try to harm her? I don't ever want to see you here again! Now get out and don't come back!"

Scrambling to her feet, her cheeks burning with shame, Sakura walked to the door, glancing back over her shoulder again and again as she left the store. Christ, the look in her eyes…

Youji winced. She looked like her heart hadn't been broken, it had been shattered. Every instinct he possessed screamed at him to go after the poor little girl – every one but the one that told him, no, you can't afford that. How could he, with Rain radiating smugness from every pore and Aya glaring daggers about himself as if _daring_ anybody to take Sakura's side? How could he without causing more trouble, without betraying himself completely? Open defiance had nearly gotten Ken killed. He couldn't give himself away. Not yet.

Poor kid, he thought. That poor, poor kid… Sighing deeply, Youji pushed himself to his feet, and the expression he turned on Aya was positively disgusted.

"I'm taking a break."

The rest of the shift passed so quietly it was almost alarming. The girls seemed to forget the incident almost immediately, going back to their giggling and whispering; the boys likewise, something Youji found positively terrifying. Aya and Rain worked quietly on display arrangements at the center table, Omi flitted about the store dispensing beaming good cheer and sunflowers. Youji brooded, unable to forget the terrible despair in Sakura's eyes as she walked from the shop floor, unable to keep himself from wondering what on Earth could have led her to behave so strangely, and so unlike herself: he slipped into the back room at three to quietly work on an arrangement for her, knowing it would change nothing.

And then, at half past four with custom slowing and the first few girls drifting back off to their homes and their families, there was Manx slipping through the door with a manila folder tucked beneath her arm. She looked, he thought, tired.

"Well, _hello_ there."

Youji smiled at the sight of her, casting an appreciative glance over the length of her shapely legs, her nipped-in waist, the swelling tops of her frankly show-stopping breasts and the face any artist would have killed to paint. The look of cool self-sufficiency in those deep blue eyes and her air of total unavailability only added to her already considerable allure. For a moment, he wished that he had his sunglasses on so that he could gaze at her over their frames: he settled for unfolding himself gracefully from his chair and draping a casual arm across her shoulders as he steered her toward the basement.

For a long moment she seemed as impassive as ever. Then her lips quirked upward at the corners, just a little, and just for a second. Before Youji had even fully realized that she was smiling at him her smile had gone.

( _So you'll help us_ , Ken had said—)

She said, "I see you're back with us," and ducked out from beneath his arm.

Aya quietly excused himself, telling Rain to watch the store – it's calming down and we won't be away long, will you be all right by yourself? – the stern, uncompromising look in his eyes, as he drifted toward the basement in their wake, promising serious trouble for any other silly little girl who dared to trouble her. Omi gave smiling apologies to the two girls who had been talking enthusiastically at him for the last ten minutes and darted after them, his trainers squeaking slightly on the tiled floor as he hurried to catch them all up.

"Where's Siberian?" Manx asked as the three of them took their seats.  
"I'm afraid he was attacked by Schreient," Omi said offhandedly, as if it didn't matter at all that his team was one man down and Masafumi's little girl gang were out for blood. "He's not badly hurt, but he'll have to sit this one out."  
The woman pursed her lips, but all she said was, "I see."

Youji watched intently as ever as she bent to put the briefing tape in the machine, but for once his mind wasn't on the view. It was on Rain, on Aya's eyes lingering as lovingly on _her_ form as his own would do on Manx's. It was on living with a girl who made pancakes and hash browns for breakfast when he was almost sure they'd never have had them in the house.

Why hadn't he noticed this before? Why hadn't he _realized_ how strange and fucked-up things had gotten? It shouldn't have taken Ken nearly getting himself killed by Schreient, and a young girl who meant no harm to anybody having her heart ripped in half before his eyes, and pancakes and hash browns for breakfast for him to realize that there was something very strange about Rain: the way she'd just turned up and taken over without anyone but Ken so much as batting an eyelid, the effect she had on people. It shouldn't have taken this much that was _wrong_ – so why had it? You were a PI, Kudou, Youji scolded himself, and you were a damn _good_ one, if you hadn't been a good PI you'd still be doing divorce work and you wouldn't even be here: how could things get this bad right under your nose without you catching on?

 _What's going on?_ Youji mouthed as Manx brushed past him on her way to the light switches.

Eyes front, head raised, Manx murmured, "I'll see you after the briefing."

And snapped out the lights.


	10. Uptown Girl

The mission briefing didn't even start well.

At first, it seemed nothing but standard, if only Youji didn't glance at the other end of the sofa where Ken usually sat. There was the basement, there was Manx, cool and beautiful and impassive, and always just slightly beyond his reach; there was the team, perched expectant as cinema-bound children on couches and chairs. The lights were snapped out, as ever and, as ever, there was Persia silhouetted against a glowing ground with his hands folded before him, and "Men of Weiss," he was saying, "this is a mission solely for agents Abyssinian and Calico."

There: ten seconds in and already Youji was thrown. _Abyssinian and Calico_? What, alone? He started, raising his head, and glanced about himself sharply, gazing first at Omi, then at Aya – he found nothing.

Nothing. Neither of them came anywhere near to sharing his surprise. Omi just nodded, as if he expected nothing less; Aya didn't so much as blink. It was as if they considered it perfectly ordinary for Kritiker to decide before the fact precisely who should take part in a specific assassination, and who should sit out. As if there were nothing unusual about Persia assigning a team a mission which their own leader could take no part in. This was strange, this was fucked-up, and nobody else even seemed to think it _odd_ , God damn it! What the Hell was going _on_ here?

"This is Michael van Haal," Persia said, carrying on oblivious to Youji's unease, "owner of GeneTech, a reputable American company specializing in genetic engineering. GeneTech opened its first laboratory in Japan eight years ago, but we have learned their Japanese branch was created to perform genetic experiments on humans and, since their real program began, they have been responsible for scores of disappearances and deaths. van Haal even used his own adoptive daughter, whose name we were unable to discover, as the subject of his twisted experiments. She died in a car crash age fifteen while trying to escape his laboratories three years ago. It was believed Van Haal's experiments stopped after his daughter's death, but we now know he restarted the program. Eliminate van Haal and Doctor Rei Ikaji, his top scientist, during the GeneTech company dinner and the experiments will be stopped for good. Hunters of Light, deny these dark beasts their tomorrow."

The image on the screen winked out and, wordlessly, Manx snapped on the lights. Opening the manila folder, she spread its contents across the table. The usual sheaf of personal data on the targets, a set of architect's blueprints, and a program of events for, and a pair of tickets to, the GeneTech dinner. The tickets themselves were oversized things, printed on thick, creamy paper elaborately engraved with flowing, elegant _kanji_ , and bordered with thick gold leaf.

Picking up the invitations, Youji gave a long, low whistle. "Wow. Looks like it's time to dig out the _white_ tie, Aya."

Yet he was thinking thus: if Persia wanted someone to fatally crash a fancy party, why tell _Aya_ to do it? Sure the guy looked top-drawer, but he couldn't mingle for the life of him and that damn sword of his was hardly discreet, and as for Calico… no, as for _Rain_ if the last mission had been anything to go by her _penchant_ for big, dramatic entrances hardly made _her_ an ideal candidate for undercover work, either… damn, he had a bad feeling about this mission. Something was going to go very wrong, he could feel it in his blood.

Why, Youji wondered, couldn't I have done this? It would have been easy. Go in, rub shoulders with the great and the good, quietly strangle van Haal in the gents when the alcohol started to get to him then run out shouting 'he's had a heart attack!'… simple. And, if he really needed an escort, there was always Ken. Get the kid so wired on painkillers he didn't even notice he was wearing a dress and he'd do just peachy. He'd be more reliable than Rain, at least.

Manx cleared her throat slightly. "There is one final detail. The dinner in question is tonight… in about three and a half hours, to be precise. Abyssinian, will you be ready in time?"  
"Of course," Aya said coolly. "You may tell Persia I accept this assignment."  
Omi turned toward him, his cheeks pale. "Will you and Calico be okay by yourselves, Aya-kun?"  
"The mission is ours," Aya replied, "and it will be completed."

Plucking the tickets from between Youji's fingers and tucking them discreetly in his pocket, Aya walked to the stairs and back up and out, to the shop, to Rain. Omi, after gathering up the blueprints and the data and slipping them back into the folder, followed closely behind – Youji hoped to head to his bedroom to make a start on the planning – and he'd have to with only a scant couple of hours to do it in, what did Persia think he wasplayingat? – not to wander blithely out into the _Koneko_ casually carrying mission data like it was his latest class assignment. Hard to tell these days…

Leaving Youji himself behind with Manx, who for once didn't seem inclined to move. Sitting down in Omi's vacated chair, she pulled out a notebook and pen of her own, then turned to face him. I'll see you after the briefing – it felt like being kept behind after class by his favorite teacher. Youji gave her a wide, cheerful smile and settled back contentedly against the cushions.

"Do you think," Manx asked, "that there was anything at all suspect about Siberian's attack?"  
Youji nodded. "Definitely. Rain's trying to sell it as an attempted abduction on herself which Ken tried to break up alone, but the pattern's wrong. When we showed Rain had a wounded arm and Ken was out cold. If Schreient genuinely planned to abduct _her_ , she should have been the one knocked out. Even presuming the abduction scenario holds true, at the very most Ken was the one Schreient wanted and _she_ broke it up. If I wasn't inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt—"  
"You'd say that she was with Schreient all along," Manx said. "Correct?"  
"Correct. Once she realized I was nearby she covered her tracks by getting one of her teammates to scratch her up a bit and going to stand by Ken, then screamed to get my attention."  
Manx nodded briskly, tapping her chin with her pen. "Plausible, but where's the proof?"  
"That, I'm afraid," Youji said with a sigh, "is where it all falls down."

Which meant it got them no nearer a solution to the problem that was Rain.

Which meant there was nothing for it. Manx simply sighed, and pushed the thought aside. It wouldn't do. Not by itself, not with no evidence and no reliable witnesses, and nobody who wasn't already predisposed to dislike Rain would take Ken's word over hers. She was, after all, easily beautiful and talented and special enough for Weiss's enemies to have taken an interest in, and her adoptive father was a rich and powerful man: Ken was just Ken, and often acted recklessly.

"As for this mission," Manx said, "it strikes me as extremely unwise to send two of you in undercover and unsupported while three other team members stand idle. I planned to ask Siberian to watch their backs, but he'd never have been ideal even without the injury… I'm going to need you, Balinese, to go in after them."  
Youji nodded. "Done."  
"I thought you'd agree. You'll need…" She broke off, tugging a disc from inside her jacket and handing it to Youji. "I copied the mission data Persia sent Calico. Please ensure you destroy the disc as soon as you're done, and keep yourself hidden during the dinner. I don't want you to make yourself known to Abyssinian or Calico unless it's plain they need the support, but if things do go wrong I want them to have competent backup, and…" She hesitated again, just for a moment. "And I want you to report back to me regardless. The more we know of her movements the better."  
"Understood," Youji said. "You can count on me, Manx."

* * *

Aya rendezvoused with Agent Calico at a Kritiker safehouse in Meguro, an elegantly-furnished apartment he had never had call to visit before. The girl invited him in over the intercom, and offered him a drink. Aya declined, taking a seat in the minimalist living room while his mysterious new teammate completed her toilette in the next room. He was running a little late, and he was annoyed that the woman wasn't ready to leave yet. He could only thank the Gods that it was always better to arrive at these events a little late than show your face too soon, but all the same, he hadn't expected to have to wait. When Agent Calico finally showed her face, he thought he would give her a piece of his mind.

Then Calico stepped into the room, her gloved fingers fumbling with her sparkling necklace, and Aya's jaw dropped.

He had thought Calico a beauty that night at the warehouse, when she had killed Kawamata; tonight, dressed in a low-cut purple evening gown, her hair in an elegant updo, the young girl was absolutely gorgeous! Good thing Youji wasn't here; the playboy would have been unable to keep his hands to himself, faced with such a breathtakingly beautiful companion. Even for a gentleman like Aya it was an effort not to gawp. Watching her fumble with the necklace's recalcitrant clasp, he scrambled to his feet, his coat slipping to the floor, took the necklace from her gloved fingers and, tucking a loose strand of her jet-black hair behind one of her ears, he drew it about her neck himself, and carefully fastened it, and left it to fall.

"What should I call you?" Aya asked her as he led her down the stairs toward his waiting Porsche. "I can't introduce you as Agent Calico of Kritiker all evening."  
The girl's full lips, painted a glossy plum that perfectly complemented her shining amethyst pools, curled upward, and she smiled a slow, coy smile as she held out one delicate hand for him to take. "You can call me Raven," she said in a sexy, musical voice that made Aya go weak at the knees. "Doctor Raven Himura. I'm a pediatric emergency surgeon."  
"Very well," Aya said, with a warm smile. "Raven it is."

Inside, Rain Akegata wanted to cheer. Her disguise was perfect!

He drove them through clogged city streets and through the winding byroads of the suburbs out into open country, out to a foursquare Victorian manor house standing in the middle of a patchwork of rolling fields, its heavy doors thrown open and all its windows ablaze with light. She took his arm as he escorted her up the gravel drive. A large sign that reached almost to Rain's bare shoulder stood by the door, reading 'GeneTech Welcomes You to it's Fifteenth Annual Company Dinner' in elegant Roman script, betraying its founder's Western origins. Beneath that, the company motto was printed: 'Uncovering the Unique for a Different Tomorrow'.

Rain hesitated at the top of the sweep of the stone stairway, shivering slightly as she gazed at the sign. Aya glanced down at her in sudden concern, and she colored, and struggled to smile, drawing her coat more closely about herself as if she were feeling the evening chill. She couldn't let him know what was on her mind… not when their whole cover depended on their being taken for a normal young couple on an evening out.

A valet took their coats, and the pair of assassins were ushered into the ballroom by a besuited flunky. Heads turned as the couple walked inside; Rain, feeling the gazes of every man in the room upon her, flushed self-consciously.

"Ayato Fujiyama," the man beside the door intoned, "and Doctor Raven Himura."

Formal dresses had always been much too fussy for Rain's taste, and the elegant gown that had been foisted upon her by her handlers tonight was no exception. It was far too revealing for her taste, with a form-fitting bodice with a dangerously plunging neckline, which left almost the entirety of her pale back exposed. The skirts were full and floor-length, with a filmy overskirt; a pair of long purple gloves with lace-trimmed edges and high-heeled shoes completed the ensemble. When Birman had showed her the shoes, delicate deep purple ankle-strapped sandals with intricate black beadwork, she had demanded to know why she couldn't simply wear her mission boots as nobody would see them beneath her fussy skirts, but the old bitch had been adamant…

They hadn't even let her wear her hair loose, or perhaps in a simple bun. Instead, her long, glossy, raven-black hair had been piled fussily on top of her head and held in place with small sparkling pins in the shape of butterflies, with only a few small curls left loose to frame her heart-shaped face, which had been beautifully made up so she looked like a goddess. Her heliotrope occuli were lined with mascara and kohl, her full lips painted a gorgeous shade of plum. Amethyst and diamond pendants shone at her ears, and a sparkling necklace of the same precious stones graced her slender throat.

She had to hope she wouldn't have to run anywhere tonight; she wouldn't get very far in this nightmare of an outfit. There hadn't even been room in her tiny clutch for her butterfly swords, and she'd had to settle for a stiletto in a thigh-mounted holster. The color was the only thing Rain liked about the dress; it was a deep, deep purple which in some lights looked almost black, and the bodice was embroidered with black and silver designs that at first appeared random but which, if one looked closer, revealed themselves to show the coiling, sinuous form of a dragon, surmounted by wind-blown roses.

In the corner, a tall redhead in a green sport coat raised his head to watch as the girl and her partner stepped inside.

"So that's the cute new kitten?" he murmured to his American companion. "It's going to be fun to play with _her_!"

Rain didn't like the hunger in the men's gazes. She flushed deeper, clinging tightly to Aya's arm, and wished she had her blades with her. If it hadn't been so important to the mission that she stay discreet, she would have hunted down every last one of those drooling creeps and taught them a lesson they wouldn't forget about keeping their eyes to themselves!

Their partners, older and dowdier makes almost to a woman, must have known they couldn't compete. They turned hostile backs upon her, bristling and murmuring resentfully among themselves – unless, of course, one were to glance in the direction of a certain Miss Kitada, gazing flatly and assessingly at the girl and her escort like a scientist might peer down the barrel of a microscope, at a specimen pinned to a slide.

"I think," she murmured to her stunned partner, "I'm going to get some air."

She made some minute adjustment to the fall of her own dress, a slim, dark affair in a 'fiftiesish cut, which didn't so much reveal everything she had as hint in an undertone about the promise of revelations to come. Stepping into the garden, she withdrew a slim cigarette from a silver case, tapping it once against the lid before slipping the case back in her handbag.

"Good evening, Kudou-san," she said to the empty air.

There was a soft _thump_ from somewhere behind her; she turned to see Youji, stood behind her as calm and easy as if he had been there for the last ten minutes. Smiling, he held out his lighter, the flame dancing at the element. Manx stepped over to him, holding her cigarette out for him, then placed it to her lips and gave a long drag.

"Of all the bars in all the world," Youji said, lighting his own cigarette with a flourish, "you had to walk into mine."  
"Quite," Manx said, raising one eyebrow in a silent statement. "And, while we're on the subject of old films, I liked this story a lot better when it was called _Pretty in Pink_ …"

The choking noise that accompanied that remark sounded, to her ears, remarkably like Youji Kudou just about managing not to swallow his cigarette. She smiled.

"You," Youji managed, through an ungraceful fit of coughing, "have seen _Pretty in Pink_?"  
"Why do you think I started curling my hair?" Manx asked dryly.  
Youji chose to ignore this. There was such a thing as too much information. "Well… I can see why you'd say that," he said, recovering slightly. "Unfortunately, our leading lady is no Molly Ringwald and the story we've fetched up in would be most accurately titled _Worship Rain: The Musical_."  
"Quite. If I didn't know better, I'd say this entire event had been stage-managed for her benefit."  
"You can say that again." Youji took a drag on his cigarette, camouflaging a heavy sigh as an exhalation. "Any sign of the target?"  
Manx glanced back over her shoulder as if she were hoping to see van Haal watching her from a clump of bushes. No luck there, the shrubbery stayed disappointingly clear of lurking Dutch-American businessmen. "None as yet. Still, he's got to be there for the dinner…"  
"Manx," Youji said almost plaintively, "tell me something. What would it hurt if I just quietly dealt with the target now? Does it really matter who takes him out as long as he's neutralized?"  
"To Persia? Unfortunately it rather seems to." She sighed again, taking a calming draw on her own cigarette. "I have no idea what the man thinks he's playing at, but apparently he promised Agent Calico that she alone would be allowed to deal with van Haal. One of the pre-conditions of her agreeing to throw in her lot with us, I believe, and yes I think it's ridiculous too."  
"Really? Man, we can do without help like that."

Manx took a final draw on her cigarette, then tossed it casually to the ground and stubbed it out with a single quick, sure motion of the foot. "Sadly," she said, "that is the material we're working with. Stay away from van Haal, Balinese. Persia's given Agent Calico quite enough rope with which to hang herself. With any luck she'll do so in such a spectacular fashion even he can't justify keeping her on. If all else fails we can say she was a lone maniac."

Well, Youji thought, it would at least be a more accurate description than most of Kritiker's cover jobs.

* * *

Rain knew she should have told Aya the truth.

All the way here she had been on the verge of blurting out her secret to him… but how could she, when if he only knew the truth he would certainly have taken her off the mission? Rain _had_ to do this – she just _had_ to! She'd waited so long for her revenge, and now, after all the long years of pain and suffering… _finally_ , that shithead would get what was coming to him!

It had been a shock to see him in the flesh after so long. The sight of his cruel, scarred face had left her trembling, feeling like a scared little girl who had been dragged from a dark, filthy basement so the man who insisted she called him _father_ could beat her again. She had almost turned tail and ran, but Aya's comforting presence by her side had kept her strong.

"Raven," Aya said in sudden concern, "are you all right?"  
Rain nodded. "I'm fine," she said bravely.

There he was, tall and fair, sat at the head of the table basking in the adoration of his colleagues and friends with that bitch Ikaji draping herself all over him. Ikaji was wearing far too much makeup and a very tight, low-cut dress that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. It was appalling to realize that a cheap little skank like _that_ could ever have replaced her own mother. He looked so pleased with himself, sitting there smirking like nothing was wrong while his slutty girlfriend batted her eyes at him. He hadn't even noticed her, had he? After all the pain and suffering he had put her through, every terrible thing he had done to her, he hadn't even noticed that she was there!

Michael van Haal.

That's right, Rain thought, angry amethyst occuli shooting fire at him over the rim of her wine glass. Smile it up, van Haal. You couldn't control me and as soon as I fooled you into thinking I was dead you thought you were safe. You think with me gone that nothing can stop your twisted plans. Well, aren't you going to be in for a surprise!

She had at least been spared the ordeal of trying to maintain an impassive demeanor in front of the boys. Rain slipped away from them soon after they returned from their briefing and headed to the Meguro safehouse where her own handler, Siamese, had been waiting for her. Siamese, a slender yet shapely young woman, was sitting on the couch in the living room dressed in a neat white skirt suit on top of a black open-necked blouse with black high heels, and the rich mahogany hair which reached her mid-back was currently pulled up into a neat bun, held in place with a pair of golden hair sticks. Her face was delicately made-up, and a small gold pendant dangled at her throat.

"Calico," Siamese had said, getting to her feet and handing her a buff folder, "it's time."  
"Time?" Rain had stretched out one hand to take the folder from her, then hesitated. "GeneTech?" she asked.  
The older girl nodded. "It's GeneTech."  
"Oh, my God."

Rain had taken the folder and opened it, delicate fingers trembling as she withdrew a black-and-white photograph of a scarred blonde man. For a moment she simply stared at it then it, like the folder, slipped from Rain's hands and tumbled to the floor. The girl had just about made it to the couch before her legs gave way, and she slumped heavily back into the cushions, tears brimming in her beautiful indigo orbs. Siamese had looked at her in concern, worried for this beautiful young girl who had become a younger sister to her. Sitting down by Rain's side, she had taken the girl's hands in her own.

"Calico," she said, "are you sure you still want to do this?"  
And the violet-eyed girl had blinked back her tears, and she had nodded. "I have to, Siamese," she had said. "For Ichigo."

Now, as she picked at the remains of her meal, Rain surreptitiously watched van Haal through her bangs, and wondered if he even remembered Ichigo. Probably not. If he couldn't remember her, there was no way he would remember Ichigo. Even in life, Ichigo had been nothing to him but a disappointment…

The awareness she was being _watched_ cut across her thoughts. Gasping, Rain raised her head and looked around to discover who was staring at her, meeting the eyes of a tall, narrow-eyed redhead sat next to an ugly old man who looked like a constipated koala. She couldn't have missed that very distinctive head of hair, or the green sport coat that encased his slender body. Him again? Any ordinary girl might have presumed that the man was staring only because he found her attractive, but why would any man think that about a girl as unattractive as Rain? She shivered slightly, uncomfortable at being regarded so closely.

"Aya," she whispered, nudging her partner slightly with one elbow, "That man won't stop looking at me."

Aya followed her gaze, starting when he realized who she was talking about. Schuldig. _Schwarz_!

* * *

From the instant the girl walked into the room, Schuldig had been unable to think of anything else.

It had been, until then, yet another unremarkable evening spent trapped in an overcrowded room full of tedious little minds buzzing with all their tedious little concerns. A bunch of dull old farts wishing they were back in the office, pouting bimbos preening and tousling their hair and batting their over-made-up eyelids at the richer-looking men while the sour-faced old frumps the men had shackled themselves to seethed by their sides… this shower didn't have a single original thought in their empty heads. Even their little dramas were petty, playing themselves out in all the usual painfully predictable ways. The idiots weren't even worth the bother of messing with.

Schuldig had been half-considering making a play for one of the girls (a cute, if dull American whose sole salient features were nice breasts, a head of very thick claret curls and toenails painted the kind of purple much beloved by twelve-year-old girls and precisely nobody else) and giving her precisely what her thoughts told him she claimed she was looking for, but that had been before _her_. Shit, she'd probably saved that little redhead's _life_ …

Her: Doctor Raven Himura.

 _Well, well,_ he said into Crawford's mind, _looks like we'll be getting a new kitty to play with._

For a moment Crawford almost seemed baffled – but then his face cleared, amber eyes narrowing as he gazed intently at the girl and her escort. _I wouldn't underestimate her, Schuldig,_ he thought back coolly. _She's clearly quite different from the rest of her litter… to say nothing of all those little hookers you chase._

Different: yes, that was it. Crawford, once again, had put his finger on it. Raven, with her glossy black hair and her slender yet nicely curved body, and sparkling amethyst orbs full of mystery and promise which shone with the secret fires of their owner's resolve… no, Raven was clearly not like the other girls; there was something different about her, something so strange and remarkable that he couldn't at first tell what it was any more than generally. All he knew was Raven was something special. She would be a far more interesting target than the silly child with the painted toenails. Schuldig smiled evilly to himself. This girl would be something to linger over, to slowly savor. This girl would be a challenge.

It wasn't until they sat down to dinner that he had realized what was so strange about the pretty new kitten.

He couldn't read her mind.

Schuldig hadn't really realized that he'd been searching for the shape of the girl's mind all along before it had dawned on him that he couldn't find her anywhere. There the girl was, sat at a table in the center of the room, sipping a glass of chilled champagne with the redheaded Weiss kitty hanging on every word she spoke – and she might as well not have been there at all. He couldn't reach her mind. She was an oasis of perfect _calm_ , a single blank spot in the center of the image that might have come upon the teeming canvas of thought by accident.

 _What?_ That simply couldn't be possible, could it? Not unless she was—could she be like _him_? Schuldig redoubled his efforts, but everything he tried, every single approach was repelled as easily as if he had never had powers at all! There was a wall, thick and quite unscaleable, about her mind. There wasn't so much as a chink in her mental armor. No matter how hard he tried to topple her mental defenses, the pretty new kitten's mind pushed back twice as hard. _Don't even think it_ , some little voice seemed to be whispering: it was a woman's voice, musical and sexy and in control, and full of sheer resolve. _I won't let you defeat me. Don't even think about fighting me, or you'll regret it_ …

 _Crawford,_ he murmured into his companion's mind, _we have to have that girl.  
_ _I agree,_ Crawford thought back in reply, _She is far too valuable an asset to let Weiss have her. With her on their side, they'll be unstoppable. We'll take her for our own – and soon._

Schuldig grinned an evil grin. Just you wait, sweet little Weiss kitty. Just you _wait_.

* * *

Youji's heart had sunk when Rain pointed Schuldig out of the crowd. Schuldig and the American guy and, next to them, the big guy himself: Reiji Takatori, resplendent in a dinner jacket and white tie, quietly eating sashimi and looking faintly bored by the whole proceedings. No wonder he'd had a bad feeling about this: this was just the kind of event which rich guys like that _would_ get invited to! Why hadn't he thought of that one before? Now here he was trapped helplessly in the rafters, able to do nothing but watch as Aya gave the entire mission the finger to try and cut the guy to pieces with a butter knife—

And then he didn't. It was as if he hadn't even noticed Takatori. Aya just sat there drinking rather bad white wine, nodding sympathetically in all the right places as Rain talked far too intently about who knew what. For a moment Youji wondered what they were talking about, then decided he'd rather not know. It was probably all about Rain, as usual.

What's wrong with this picture apart from _everything_?

That wasn't the worst of it, though. Not by a long chalk. The worst of it was what happened after the meal: after the last of the places were cleared away, with a dozen black-clad waitresses making their way along the lines of the tables carrying oversized coffee pots and plates of wafer-thin mints. At the end table, a couple were getting to their feet: a distressingly attractive woman in a black cocktail dress, and a tall, fair-haired American. Those, Youji supposed, would be Ikaji and van Haal – in other words, they were the targets – and Aya and Rain were really leaving it awfully late to deal with them.

As Youji watched from his perch in the rafters, van Haal made his way to the small stage at the far end of the hall through the usual slight shower of polite post-prandial applause. Mounting the stairs, he headed for a cloth-draped lectern bearing nothing more sinister than the usual carafe of water, behind which stood a large display stand bearing the GeneTech logo and motto. Ikaji waited a few feet beside him, her hands clasped behind her back, as he tapped the microphone.

"Good evening," van Haal began, formally. "And may I say what a pleasure it has been to see you all tonight—"

And from there on in Youji could have been watching _anime_. An exceptionally daft _anime_ about a hot teenage superspy who thought the only problem with James Bond's MO was that Bond was far too discreet.

"Stop right there, van Haal!" Rain shouted, leaping suddenly to her feet and sending her coffee cup flying. "I swore I'd make you suffer for what you did to me! Now it's time for you to pay for your crimes!"

If there had been a wall within shooting distance, Youji was sure he would have banged his head against it. As it was, he made do with groaning – the downside to which, of course, was that he remembered everything that happened next. At least with stupid _anime_ a guy could get up and change the channel…

There was a crash as Rain's chair pitched to the floor behind her; another, louder series of clatters and bangs as she leapt straight up and onto the table and from there somersaulted toward van Haal, her skirts flying, her pinned-up hair somehow working its way loose, cascading out in a waterfall of glossy raven curls. Two shining blades appeared in her hands as she leapt, gleaming like glass shards in the overhead light. Landing elegant as a gymnast on the ball of one foot, Rain pivoted and sprung for Ikaji, slashing open the woman's throat with a single, deadly blow. Ikaji fell dead without so much as a cry.

Everyone just stood there, that was the thing Youji remembered. They all just stood there and watched.

van Haal was staring. His eyes wide, his cheeks pale, he stared between the extinguished form of his assistant and the girl who had killed her, her violet eyes blazing with fury and her twin blades smeared with Ikaji's blood.

"Who _are_ you?" he whispered – yet even from the rafters Youji heard him perfectly.  
The girl took an angry step toward him, blades raised. "Can't you remember?" she spat. "The Akegata family! The family _you_ ruined!"  
"Akegata?" In spite of himself, van Haal blinked. He looked almost confused. "I've never heard of any Akegata—"  
"Liar!" Rain shrieked. "How _dare_ you dishonor her name like that!"

And yet he wasn't lying; Youji could see it in his face. His confusion was simply too genuine. van Haal really _had_ never heard the name before…

He didn't have time to think on it further. A shot cracked out, harsh and flat, and from their places in the audience a group of burly black-suited men were climbing to their feet, drawing guns from their jackets and pointing them straight at Rain. They were a day late and a dollar short, but Youji supposed they had to be seen to make the effort all the same.

"Step away from the President!"  
"How dare you threaten her!"

Yup. Just when he thought things couldn't possibly get any messier there was Aya, right on cue, clearly wounded in his nonexistent chivalry by the men pointing guns at his girl.

Jumping to his feet, Aya drew his katana (where _had_ he been keeping it?), striding forward and cutting down the nearest of the bodyguards while Rain leapt from the stage, blades flashing in the light, bearing another of the men to the ground. The guard just about had time to scream before Rain's butterfly swords found his heart, the girl springing gracefully back up and cutting down another guard who had drawn a bead on Aya. The crowd, suddenly remembering that they had legs and voices and could use them both, screamed and ran for the doors, shoving and elbowing one another in their desperation to get away from the crazy people with the guns and the swords.

And van Haal did likewise. As soon as Rain's attention was safely on the bodyguards, van Haal, of course, did the smart thing and made a break for it, rushing for the rear doors flanked by another brace of besuited mooks. Rain turned just in time to see his back vanishing through the doorway, swallowed up by the darkness of the night!

"van Haal's getting away!" she cried. "Stop him!"

She quickly dispatched the last of the guards and bolted for the door, kicking off her high-heeled shoes on the way, Aya sheathing his sword and following in her wake.

Well, if Kritiker ever wanted to make a training video on How Not To Kill Dudes In Public, all they'd have to do was re-enact this mission. Pause the tape every time a trainee would've done something differently; an essay question at the end for any would-be Omis on how they'd plan things to avoid that confused and injudicious farce. Youji dropped from his perch in the rafters and picked his way through a tangle of fallen chairs, broken crockery, trampled centerpieces and the occasional stray ladies' shoe. Manx, waiting by one of the doors and looking barely less spare than the forgotten name labels that marked the place settings, met his eyes, shaking her head and giving a sad little sigh. Youji thought he knew the feeling.

"You'd better go after them," Manx said in reply to the question he hadn't asked.

Youji arrived outside just in time to see the taillights of a car – a black executive sedan, by the looks of it – receding into the distance. Aya had hesitated a short way down the drive, one hand on the hilt of his sword: Rain had run farther and now stood, the wind whipping at her loose hair and setting the skirts of her elegant gown billowing as if she were straining at an invisible leash, her shoulders heaving as she panted for breath and stared after the car in desperate rage.

"He's going to escape!" Rain was crying. "We've got to go after him! We've got to stop him!"  
"It's too late, Calico," Aya said, stepping to her. "We'll never catch up with him now."  
"Y… you don't mean that! We can follow him, and—"  
"No," Aya said gravely, placing one hand on her shoulder. "We've lost him. I'm sorry, Calico. It's my fault"  
"Don't touch me!" Furiously, Rain slapped his hand away, watching helplessly as van Haal's taillights rounded a bend in the drive, vanishing into the darkness. "He's gone…" she whispered. "He's _gone_. No…"

Tears sprang to the girl's amethyst orbs; her legs gave way beneath her and she fell to her knees on the asphalt. The twin swords clattered from her gloved hands as the first tear trickled slowly down her alabaster cheek.

" _Nooooooooooo_!"

This was it: Weiss had officially hit rock bottom. Now they were starting to dig.


	11. It Ain't Me, Babe

Friday at the _Koneko_ with Rain and Omi safely sequestered in some classroom and Ken Hidaka had either hit his head far harder than anybody had realized, or he had always been this strange and Youji simply hadn't noticed before.

"What _are_ you doing, Ken?"

What Ken was doing was counting. Standing in front of the store, one hand resting on his hip, he was pointing at each of the second-floor windows in turn, quietly counting under his breath. One, two, three; hesitating only momentarily when he reached the last window, he would frown, then backtrack and start over. One, two—

"Counting the windows," Ken said distractedly, as if it were obvious. "One. _Two_ …"  
"Why do you want to do that?" Youji asked, leaning back against the table with his hands in his pockets. "Don't tell me you're thinking of applying to college."  
The boy let his hand fall, giving Youji a nasty look. "Ha fucking ha. If you must know, there's a window missing."  
"One missing? There's three windows there, Ken, there always has been. How many are you expecting to see?"  
Ken said, "Four."  
" _Four_ ," Youji echoed. "Why four all of a sudden?"  
"Look."

Ken pointed upward, up at the windows of the second-storey living areas, and Youji followed his gaze, feeling himself start to frown. There was nothing much there: just three windows, same as there always had been. He couldn't work out for the life of him what it was about them that had Ken so fascinated. No matter how slow an afternoon it was, you had to be really hard up for entertainment before counting the windows of your own home seemed stimulating.

"I don't see anything," Youji told him.  
"No, _look_ ," Ken insisted. " _Really_ look at what's _there_ , Youji. There's the training room, that's those two windows right there. And there's Omi's bedroom window next to it. That makes three. Where's Rain's room?"  
"Down the corridor from Omi's where it's always—oh." Youji hesitated, then looked away, rubbing his eyes, before gazing back up at the building where the missing fourth window had utterly failed to materialize. " _Oh_. Well, I'll be goddamned."  
"It's really obvious when you notice it," Ken said, "isn't it?"

Youji had to agree that it was.

One of Ken's peculiar talents – and it only sounded easy until a guy actually had to do it for himself – was the ability to see what was right in front of him. Usually it was just a pain, manifesting as a marked tendency to point out that empty rooms were, in fact, empty. Every so often though the boy would play a blinder like this one, leaving Youji to remind himself, yet again, that a man should never underestimate how useful it was to keep a guy who only saw what was really there around.

The missing window _was_ obvious when you noticed it: first, however, came noticing it in the first place. That was the hard part, and that was where Ken came in.

"But if Omi's room is there," Ken said, "and Rain's is down the corridor from it… where'd the corridor come from? And where in the nine Hells does it go?"

All he was really asking was, _what's going on?_

"I have no idea," Youji told him, "but there's only one way to find out. Come on."

And, without waiting to see if Ken was following, he turned back to the store only to discover his current favorite among the girls stood on the sidewalk right in front of him, her arms full of books, staring at him as if he'd managed to misplace his head. Half past one on a Friday afternoon and no question why _she_ was here. If he'd only played his cards right he could no doubt have charmed her number out of her, or even a promise to meet up – and Ken, damn the boy, was standing there, hands planted firmly on his hips, looking as if this was somehow _his_ fault.

"Youji-san? What are you doing, is one of the windows broken?"  
"After a fashion," Youji told her, "yes. I'll be right back, okay?"

* * *

"What the Hell did you mean," Ken asked him a few moments later, "after a fashion?"  
"Well what was I supposed to say?" Youji said. "My friend here thinks we're living in an Escher litho, back in five?"

Ken just looked blank, and Youji added the life and works of M. C. Escher to the disturbingly long list of things his friend appeared genuinely worryingly ignorant about – which, now he thought about it, probably included lithography as well. Still, fair was fair, Ken must have explained zonal defending to him at least three times by his reckoning and he still didn't have any idea what it involved beyond a soccer pitch and Ken yelling the kind of insults a guy could only pick up in a locker room at the television.

It wasn't like any of that would help now. Even the insults seemed somehow misplaced. Here they were standing outside Omi's bedroom, staring down a corridor neither of them could quite believe in at a room that shouldn't have been possible. Clearly this was no time for Dutch lithography.

"No," Ken said patiently, "I think we're living in our house. Except it's got a bit bolted on."  
"Are you suggesting she did some interior remodeling and nobody noticed?"  
Ken gave him that look again, narrow-eyed and slightly suspicious as if this was somehow all his fault. "That's stupid, Youji. There'd be a big lump sticking out the wall. Or the neighbors would have written us a letter saying something like get this girl's bedroom out my… well, whatever's on the other side of that."  
"I'm not saying this isn't odd," Youji conceded, "but you should never confuse the unusual with the impossible."  
"So what are you saying, you want me to buy that she smuggled in a spare room that never existed before without anyone noticing? Even the outside of the building? Youji, this is just a fucking mess!"

Well, that much Youji would give him. No matter how strangely he was acting Ken had a point about that, at least.

Not that the kid seemed to have finished being strange. As if determined to push the act to the bitter end, Ken had fished a pair of pruning shears from the pocket of his apron. Carefully, he tossed the shears into the corridor, frowning when they fell to the floor with a loud, heavy _thump_.

"Huh. Looks solid enough."  
Youji just sighed, shaking his head. "Ken, we've all been down there before. You won't fall through the floor. It's real."  
"Then _where's_ her _window_?"

Yeah, he'd been down there before, he was sure of it, but something about Ken's worry was contagious. It was crazy, Youji knew that sure as he knew anything – it's just a _corridor_ , kid – but Ken wasn't the twitchy, paranoid sort. The kid didn't get this worked up over nothing. When Ken moved to retrieve the shears, taking a few cautious paces out into that inexplicable corridor, it was all Youji could do not to catch him by the shoulder and pull him back. Ridiculous, really, and yet there it was. Carefully Ken stooped to pick the shears and then straightened, hesitating just before Rain's door to gaze at Youji over one banked shoulder.

"What am I standing on?" he asked. "Does this look weird to you? Can you take a photograph?"

God help him, Youji was actually considering it.

"What with?" he asked instead – and who did he think he was kidding, anyway? Kudou, if you're objecting on _technical_ grounds he knows he's got you. "We don't have a camera, Ken. You just look like a guy standing in a hall to me."  
"So we don't have a camera, so what?" Ken tugged a battered spiral-bound notepad from the pocket of his apron. "You're an artist, aren't you? Can't you do a sketch?"  
"Yeah, but what would that prove?"  
Ken muttered something mercifully inaudible, tossed him the notepad, then leaned back against Rain's bedroom door with his hands in his pockets. "Humor me."

Which was why doing anything more serious than choosing a movie with Ken Hidaka could be such a pain. Sometimes Youji figured his stubbornness might have been kind of funny, if only it hadn't been so painfully familiar – and hadn't made it so damned difficult to turn the boy down.

(Besides, didn't he want to know how the Hell Rain could have snuck a _spare room_ up behind his back, too?)

"Oh, very well." Youji sighed theatrically, uncapping his pen. He knew when he was beaten. "Hold still, okay?"  
Ken started. "What?"  
"Hold still," Youji told him. "That's… well, that would be pretty much the opposite of what you're doing now. So don't do that and we should get on just fine."  
"I meant sketch the _corridor_ , you ass!"  
"Then don't stand in it," Youji said mildly – then, when Ken made as if to move, held up one hand. "Wait. I think this is gonna work out better with something to focus on. If I'm concentrating too hard on what I can see, it could be kind of tricky to draw whatever you think is really _there_."  
"What'd you mean what _I_ think is there? Dammit Youji, whose side are you on?" The boy spoke angrily but he slumped heavily back against Rain's white-painted bedroom door all the same, fidgeting slightly as he attempted to settle himself comfortably. "She doesn't have a _window_ , Youji, you tell me what to think."  
"I think," Youji said, "that if you're genuinely onto something here, Kenken, you're not even standing in the same building as me right now. Now shut up, I'm trying to concentrate."

It should have been a nothing of a background. It was, after all, merely a hallway and not even a very interesting example of that. Just bare, varnished floorboards, a cupboard, an uninteresting stretch of wall painted a plain white. When he first moved in Youji had talked about hanging a print there, but between one thing and another he'd never quite gotten round to it; Ken, more practically, got it into his head there should be more space in the bathroom and had dragged the linen closet out there, and that had put an end to that.

Youji sketched quickly, concentrating on Ken – on the cant of his head, the set of his shoulders, the loose folds of the shirt he never had quite grown into. He tried not to think about what he was roughly blocking in _around_ the boy, but one thing was certain: it damn sure didn't feel like he was drawing any kind of linen closet.

Ken had a certain gift for stillness he seldom, if ever chose to use. He certainly wasn't using it now; ten minutes the sketch had taken, and the boy was already starting to fidget as his friend put the finishing touches to the background he was trying very hard not to actually _see_. Youji (as he tucked away the pen and glanced down at the picture on the pad, only to blink and rub his eyes, then look again) thought he knew the feeling.

"What's up?" Ken asked. "You look like you swallowed a bug."

In reply, Youji held the pad out to the boy, wordlessly inviting him to see for himself. Ken frowned at it for a minute, then tried to tilt Youji's wrist for a better view until Youji told him not to be so bloody stupid and it dawned on him that he could just take the pad himself. It took him only a couple of seconds to drop it.

"Jesus _fuck_."

And that was an understatement if Youji had ever heard one.

That was Ken all right, but he was propping up the wall in a stranger's bathroom. A foot or so further down the corridor and he'd have been standing right in the middle of the empty tub. Either Youji was going crazy or the rest of the world was, and he wasn't at all sure right now which he'd prefer.

"She did it," Ken announced after a long moment had passed in awkward silence. "She must have done."  
Even now it sounded ridiculous – just not quite ridiculous enough. "That's crazy," Youji told him. "How could a normal girl have done something like this?"  
"Oh for fuck's sake! When was Rain ever interested in _normal_? She's _not_ _like_ other girls, she's… she's just _different_!"  
"Different," Youji echoed, as if the word meant nothing. "Okay, Ken, so she's different. That's not a crime, and it still doesn't explain this hallway."  
Ken wasn't listening. He was pacing, worrying at the nail of one finger. "Christ, Youji," he said, "this is just her goddamn door. If that's what we get when you try to draw her bedroom, what the fuck'd you get if you tried to draw _her_?"

* * *

Half an hour found them in the basement, Youji armed with a sketchpad and charcoals, Ken scribbling something in biro on a spiral-bound notepad he used for writing down telephone orders in. It wasn't at all easy to dissuade Ken from doing something when he set his mind to it so, Youji thought, what harm was there in riding this crazy train all the way to the end of the tracks? If it did nothing else it got them out the shop. Sure, Ken, let's try and draw Rain now – we work with her every day, we should remember her well enough. Why the Hell not?

"Done," Ken said, raising his head from his notepad.  
"Good." Youji snapped his fingers, holding out one hand to him. "Let's see it, then."

Ken handed the pad over, taking Youji's own from him and frowning over what he found there. What he looked so worked up about Youji didn't know: his job was easy. Youji, after all, could actually draw. As for deciphering what Ken had intended with this generic anime scribble—

Huh. Youji raised his eyebrows in exaggerated surprise. Ken was… well, calling him a competent artist would have been pushing it, but for all Rain had come out looking disturbingly like she was about to go Super Saiyan it was at least obvious what he thought he was driving at. Too bad what he was driving at was – at a conservative estimate – at least two years older and twenty pounds heavier than the sylph-like schoolgirl Rain. Who the Hell did Ken think he had been drawing?

"Even you," Youji said, "cannot possibly be that bad an artist."

And braced himself, only smiling when Ken hit him in the arm with his own sketchpad.

"Look who's talking," Ken muttered, jabbing one accusing finger at Youji's own sketch. "Rain's got _long_ hair, you idiot! And she never had a freckle there."  
"I know that," Youji said far too casually. "Artistic license, Kenken, I drew her with her hair tied back."  
"Yeah, but why?"  
Youji sighed. "Hidaka, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Yes, Youji thought a little wistfully as he watched Ken blink and frown and try to puzzle what the Hell that was supposed to mean out, that had been below the belt. Just as long as it stopped him asking questions, though—

"Youji," Ken said, "these don't look remotely like they're supposed to be the same girl."

That's because you can't draw to save your life, Kenken- the retort was on the tip of his tongue, but something wouldn't let him say it. Reducing the whole uneasy situation to a single mean-spirited quip just seemed wrong of him, somehow. Ken – by the look on his face, by the tone of his voice – was clearly worried and even if Youji thought he was worrying about nothing turning the whole thing into a joke at his expense… well, it just didn't seem fair on the kid, somehow.

All he could think of to say was, "Of course they're the same girl."  
"I don't think so," Ken said quietly. Then added, quickly and almost anxiously, "I _know_ I can't draw, Youji. But… say you tried to draw her like I have. With the biro and the shit art and everything. It still wouldn't look the same! It's like… it's like when we look at her we're not even seeing the same thing!"

"But that's what art is—" Youji began, only to break off when Ken rounded on him, raising the sketchpad he still held as if he were threatening to hit him with it.  
"Don't give me that, Kudou! An apple is an apple whoever draws it! There's something really goddamn _weird_ going on here and I don't fucking _like_ it!"  
And he was serious. Dead serious. "Ken," Youji said, "what exactly are you implying? Rain's somehow responsible for all this? I don't think she's on the level either and I can't say I much care for the effect she's had on Aya, but isn't this pushing it a bit?"  
"Then what about the corridor?" Ken demanded, as if he thought this was somehow conclusive – and who knew, to him maybe it was. "It's fucked up in _her favor_ , Youji, who else'd do it? For Christ's sake, who'd even bother?"

Youji wished it didn't sound so reasonable. Sounded, in fact, like something he should have been thinking. Who else would have had the motive to do anything of the sort? The only person who benefited was Rain: just as the only person who benefited from the sudden fondness of the neighborhood boys for hanging round a flower shop was Rain, just as Rain was the only one who could possibly have had anything to gain from poor little Sakura humiliating herself in front of a man she adored. Just as the only person who liked the way Aya was changing was Rain. It was all for her sake, every last bit of it.

But that didn't have to mean she was the one who was changing it, did it? Ken might have thought so but Ken, not to put too fine a point on it, wasn't exactly Mr. Logical at the best of times. No, there had to be another solution, a sensible one—

Damned if he had any idea what it could have been, though.

The sound of footsteps – light but confident, a woman's gait – on the metal treads of the spiral stairway put an abrupt stop to those speculations. Youji, his brows quizzically arched, glanced up and over one shoulder to the staircase; next to him Ken's head snapped up, and the boy's eyes were narrowed in suspicion. He relaxed visibly at the sight of Manx – or, more accurately, the sight of her shoes. Youji, for his part, gave the woman a charming smile.

"Well, well, if it isn't Miss Manx," he said. "To what do we owe this pleasure?"  
"I'm afraid this isn't a social call, Balinese," Manx replied, coolly as ever, but her manner seemed to soften as she gazed down on them. "I'm glad to see you two alone, though. No—" Ken had got to his feet, "—please sit down, Siberian. There's something I need to talk to you both about and it would be best I did so alone."

Which meant, of course, that it was about Rain. Hurriedly Ken sat back down again, glancing about himself for something to shove the sketchbooks behind. Sure, his expression said, Manx was trustworthy but that hardly meant this whole sketchbook thing wouldn't look deeply weird to her… complete lack of anything resembling a sofa cushion aside, maybe there was hope for the kid yet.

"So, Manx," Youji said with a smile, "if it's not the mere pleasure of my company you're here for, what can we do for you?"  
"We have another mission," Manx replied with something that sounded worryingly like a sigh, smoothing her skirt out and taking a seat opposite them. "No, Siberian, don't get up, this isn't a briefing yet. That's one of the things I need to talk to you about. I've noticed… let us call it a certain _pattern_ in the missions you've been assigned lately."  
"Pattern?" Ken echoed. "Like what?"  
"A pattern in that that they require a large amount of undercover work that not only throws Agents Abyssinian and Calico together, but that they specifically call upon the abilities of Agent Calico to the extent one might say they were designed to _showcase_ them. It strikes me as suspicious that a matter of days after receiving a mission that called on Abyssinian and Calico to go undercover as a couple and put themselves in harm's way, Weiss should be assigned another, seemingly unrelated mission that requires the exact same thing."  
Ken blinked. "Wait, you're saying these things are being set up to make Rain look good?"  
"That would be my theory," Manx replied, "yes."  
"But why?" Youji asked. That doesn't make sense, Manx. "Why would Kritiker want to do something like that?"  
"That, Balinese, would be what I've been attempting to find out. Unfortunately, there have been…" She hesitated, groping for a word. " _Issues_. I have yet to work out by what criteria Persia has selected the last few targets, and I've had no more luck in obtaining full access to Calico's records. I intend to keep trying, but until I know precisely where she's claiming to have come from I see no way of looking into the truth of those claims. So I've come to ask for your help."  
" _Ours_?"  
Ken sounded disbelieving. Youji hardly blamed him. "He's got a point, Manx. What can _we_ do Kritiker can't?"  
Manx just smiled. "For one," she said, "you're around her all the time. You can let me know if she lets anything slip."

* * *

Well, Ken supposed they could hardly say Manx hadn't warned them.

As ever, Rain wasn't with them; as ever, she suddenly remembered that there was something she just had to do that would only take a minute and she'd be back by dinner, she promised! and left the building. No doubt headed off to her own briefing elsewhere and why the Hell couldn't Omi and Aya _see_ this, why did they persist in thinking it was simply a strange and fortunate coincidence that Rain kept upping and leaving every single time they got a mission? They weren't stupid guys: God knew why they persisted on acting it just because it would suit Rain if they did.

Of course everything was acting kind of like that at the moment. Even Kritiker was, even Persia. How else were they supposed to explain why Persia had even heard of Kyoshiro Mitsua and the Core?

(Didn't guys like this just go to prison?)

"Weiss," Persia was saying, as the image on the video flickered from his silhouetted face to a headshot of a handsome middle-aged man with a sly smile on his face, "this is Kyoshiro Mitsua, music promoter and owner of the members-only club The Core. Mitsua has been implicated in the disappearances, and subsequent deaths, of several talented young female singers who vanished after successfully auditioning for a job in his club."

Next to Ken Youji stirred, muttering something discontented along the lines of it wasn't 1938 any more and had anyone told Mitsua this, if the rest of them had to live in the present he damn well did too.

"Once he had lured the girls to his club, the victims were sedated by means of a drugged drink, then auctioned off to the highest bidder. His favorites among the girls, though, were not put up for auction at all but were abducted to his mansion, where a far worse fate awaited them—" Youji pulled a face; Ken fidgeted slightly, gazing up at Manx and since when did they really need to know all this stuff? wouldn't 'he's a bad dude and he's killing girls' have done? It normally did! "—as he slowly killed them over several weeks. Recently, though, he has turned to abducting couples from his club and subjecting them to the same torments. The victims chosen in this manner all have one thing in common: one or both of them was a natural redhead."  
"Oh," Youji muttered. "What a surprise."

Aya, stood across the room, said nothing. He hadn't turned a single perfect red hair.

"Agents Abyssinian and Calico," Persia continued, as the screen flickered from crime-scene stills of broken young bodies lying in gutters or patches of scrubland back to his own shadowed form, "will pose as a couple and infiltrate the club to get Mitsua alone and off-guard. The rest of you will provide backup in the event of anything going wrong. Hunters of light, deny this dark beast his tomorrows!"

Hardly worth Omi's time to prep them all after that, Ken thought as Manx snapped the lights back on. Not when Persia'd decided exactly how everything was going to go down already and Christ but he'd had just about all he could take of this. Even their goddamn missions were fucked up these days; even the _briefings_ were…

"One more thing," Manx said – was that a note of weariness in her voice? – as she handed out folders of utterly extraneous data and the VIP pass Aya would need to get into Mitsua's private rooms. "Preliminary surveillance and undercover work by Agent Calico has indicated that Mitsua will be attending the club for the last time tomorrow night. Apparently—" and that was definitely a sigh, "—he will be flying out to Los Angeles to help set up a talent agency first thing on Monday, and will not return to Japan for six months. Persia insists your mission _must_ be completed by Sunday morning without fail."

Huh. Ken blinked, trading a disbelieving glance with Youji. Well, perhaps it was no bad thing they weren't being expected to plan this one themselves.

* * *

"Now look what you've done. How could you be so ungrateful?"  
"Aya, all I said was I didn't like mashed potato."

Seven PM the following evening and Aya glared at Ken over a table laden with the picked-over remains of yet another All-American extravaganza as, somewhere out of sight, the shop door slammed behind the fleeing form of Serenity Raven Kath'rynn Sakura Enigma Hikari Akegata and, if he hadn't had it dinned into him by the nuns that belief in bad omens was somehow unforgivably Pagan, he'd have been feeling very, very worried about what this meant for the rest of the evening. And all this over a plate of chicken and potato.

"Our guest slaved for hours over that meal—"  
"It's not like I forced her to!" Ken retorted. "And I'm sick to death of this diner crap!"  
"Rain's cooking," Aya said low and dangerous and wasn't he overreacting just a _touch_? "is not 'diner crap', Hidaka."  
"I don't care what it is, I just want something with bloody _rice_ for a change!"

Youji sighed, picking up his own plate and getting to his feet – made you look, Hidaka. Ken looked, and couldn't help but notice Youji hadn't done much more than diligently toy with his food either. He hadn't even touched the cheese. Someone, Ken thought, really needed to tell Rain what 'lactose intolerant' meant. Any volunteers?

"He's got a point, Aya. This kind of stuff's fine for a change, but not all the ti—"  
" _Enough_." Aya cut him off, glaring furiously at the both of them as if he'd caught them spitting on God. "I've had just about all I can take of this ingratitude. When Rain returns, you will apologize to her. Both of you. And that's an order."  
Ken stared at him. "What are you, my _dad_ now?"  
"Forget it," Youji said with a sigh, pitching the contents of his plate into the trash. "He's gone."

As if to underscore the point, the door slammed again, shuddering in its frame as Aya stalked from the room, leaving Ken gazing after him in complete amazement. Remind me again why you even _care_?

"What the _Hell_?"  
"Don't ask me, Kenken," Youji said wearily. "I'm just as lost as you are."  
"Well, shit," Ken said, "now we're really in trouble."

So no, the evening hadn't even started well. When, after wearily cleaning up the remnants of their abortive evening meal and stacking the last of the dishes in the drying rack, Ken finally made his way upstairs to get ready for the mission he didn't even want to go on in the first place, things only went downhill.

It had been bad enough just knowing they were going to have to spend the evening hanging round a sex club in the hope that some old pervert would take a shine to Aya (that he would take a shine to Rain went without saying, and didn't _that_ just say it all). It only took running into a suspiciously freshly-scrubbed Omi on the stairwell – towel-drying his hair and prattling cheerfully about the bathroom being free so it was okay for him to go take his shower now, as if there'd been anything stopping him before that! – to have Ken realize that they were about to get substantially worse.

"What are you going to wear, Ken-kun?"

What was he going to _wear_? Jesus, wasn't it bad enough that Aya thought he was the entire team's dad without Omi deciding he was a fifteen year old girl? Ken stared at his friend in disbelief for a moment, wondering if he'd had any idea what that had sounded like… but no, going by the open, expectant, utterly unselfconscious smile on the boy's face, he hadn't done. Wait, that had been a _serious question_?

"What I always wear," Ken said. Then, when Omi frowned, brows furrowing in disappointment, he added, "Or something. It's a mission, right? So I figured I'd wear my… my mission… stuff?"  
"You can't wear your mission clothes to the Core, Ken-kun!" Omi chided him gently. "Go put on your clubbing gear!"

 _Clubbing gear_.

Ken didn't have any clubbing gear. He didn't go clubbing either, for that matter, and while he was on the subject nor did Omi but now hardly seemed the time to bring that up. He managed to stop staring at Omi in complete bewilderment long enough to stammer something that could have been taken as assent, and the boy had beamed at him and practically _skipped_ off to his room to get changed. Heaving a sigh, Ken walked into the bathroom to take the shower he hadn't been planning on having until they got home. It seemed easier, somehow, than arguing.

He'd not been in there five minutes and was still washing the shampoo from his hair when Aya banged on the door and told him to hurry up. Other people needed to take a shower, too!

"The door's open," Ken told him.

The sudden frosty silence from outside the door told him that Aya thought he was completely missing the point. Jesus fuck what was _wrong_ with everyone this evening?

"Fujimiya, you're _not_ a fucking _American_ , if you wanna shower so bad what's stopping you?"  
Aya's silence was now so glacial that it was a wonder the water wasn't running cold. "Hurry _up_ , Ken. You're not the only one in this household."  
"Why do you think the bathroom's so big if we _don't_ —"  
" _Hurry up_."  
"Jesus Christ, Aya! Either come in or fuck off!"

A deep, angry sigh and the sound of receding footsteps – and, distantly, yet _another_ loud _slam_ – told Ken that Aya had chosen Door Number Two. Which made… well, it made about as much sense as everything else that had happened since they closed the shop for the night. Sighing, Ken stuck his head back under the shower. It wasn't like it was his fault Aya was determined to make life difficult for himself, was it?

* * *

"Well, Calico, it's been a long time. But we finally tracked him down."

As always, when Rain pushed open the door to the Meguro safehouse, she found Siamese already there and waiting in her usual place on the couch. Sat calm and collected with her hands folded in her lap and her long, elegant legs crossed at the knee, the older woman raised her head when Rain stepped into the room, and gave her a warm smile.

As always, Siamese was dressed impeccably. She was wearing a heather-gray single-breasted suit jacket and a skirt to match, with an asymmetrical ruffled hemline. A patterned scarf was wrapped loosely about her delicate throat, and on her feet she wore black ballerina-style pumps. Her burgundy hair was loose, and tumbled gently about her heart-shaped face. She made Rain – still dressed in the tight purple tee-shirt with a black winged heart printed on the front, loose black bondage pants with skull patterns on the straps and purple Chuck Taylors she had worn for work – feel very untidy indeed.

"Tracked who down?" Rain heard herself asking. Surely it couldn't be… "They haven't found van Haal!"  
Siamese shook her head, smiling sadly, her eyes downcast as she gazed at the file in her lap. "No. It's not _him_ , I'm afraid."  
"Oh," Rain said. Then again, " _Oh_ …"

Kicking off her shoes, the young girl sat down heavily on the couch opposite Siamese, drawing her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms about them. Try as she might, Rain couldn't stop the dark path her thoughts were taking. To know that van Haal was still out there, still free to hurt others just as he had so hurt Rain… and to know that it was all her fault he still lived! He had been there beneath her hands, and she had lost him! But no, he who had done all those terrible things he had done to her and to her dear, sweet little brother, her loving and beautiful mother, her teammates, the only friends she had ever had… _he lived on_ —!

What if he came for Aya, just as he had for everyone else?

Rain shivered, huddling up tighter. Unconsciously, she gave a sob, a single tear trickling down one of her pale cheeks. She didn't move to wipe it away. God, van Haal, that bastard! All her sufferings, all her losses… it was all his fault! And now they couldn't even _find_ him!

"Calico!" Siamese cried in sudden dismay. She sprung to her feet, wrapping her arms about the girl's delicate shoulders and gathering her into a loving embrace. "Calico, I'm so sorry! I promise you, Persia is doing all he can to track him down again… I know this is hard for you, but have faith in us, please! Kritiker won't let you down!"  
"Thank you, Siamese…" Rain raised her head from the woman's shoulder, smiling bravely up at her through her pain. Her beautiful amethyst orbs were bright and swum with unshed tears. "I know you're doing all you can. I know you'll find him again, and when you do, I'll be ready!"  
Siamese smiled back at her. "Persia promised you van Haal's life when you agreed to join us. He will not go back on his word. You will have your retribution, Calico. You _will_. Tonight Wraith will be avenged, and soon we will—"  
She got no further. "Wraith… you mean Anya!" Rain cried, her grasp tightening on Siamese's shoulders. "You found…!"  
"Kyoshiro Mitsua," Siamese said, her full lips, painted a glossy reddish brown, curving into a triumphant smile as she tugged a photo from the file on her lap and held it out to the girl. "And Aya and Weiss will be at your side."

Rain snatched the photo from her, her tears drying as she surveyed every contour of the smug and hateful face she had seen in so many of her nightmares. Oh, how she had dreamed of this day! Now finally, his time had come… and the ghost of her first true friend, the shapely and beautiful young redhead with the laughing blue eyes who had taken her in and taught her everything she knew about assassination, could rest in peace.

 _Kyoshiro Mitsua._ Though her lashes were damp and her cheeks stained with tears, Rain was smiling: a smile as terrible and beautiful as death.

* * *

There was English on the tee-shirt. It was black and tight-fitting and it said… something in blue and purple letters and Ken couldn't understand it. Be… _something, something_ , two long English words he didn't know. He just knew that it had made Youji smirk when he saw it – it had been that day they'd all gone shopping for Rain's stuff, weirdly – and, smirking, he had bought it for Ken. Ken had said _thanks, I guess_ , and buried the thing in his closet and never expected to actually have to go out wearing it.

The only problem was he had nothing else in his closet that Youji deemed even partway suitable.

Youji had smirked again as he tossed the thing to him and told him, _put that on_. That and black jeans and boots would have to do, he supposed. It wasn't really like Ken offered him a lot to work with.

"This is clubbing gear?" Ken asked him once he was dressed, blinking down at himself in confusion.  
Youji frowned, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. He said, "Vaguely. You've got some fingerless gloves, right?"  
"Yeah, in my jacket pocket. Why?"  
"Put them on," Youji told him. "And… wait here a second, I'll go get—just wait here, okay?"

Ken sighed, deeply and wearily: already he was tired of this whole stupid mission and he hadn't even gone on it yet. Retrieving the gloves, he tugged them on then sat back down on his bed, turning to the laptop he'd been working at during the lunch break. It was all very well for Youji, he thought, idly picking at the keys. He could just wear his mission gear and leave the coat off. Not that he was doing that, of course – he'd have considered that way too unimaginative – but he _could_ have done and Ken envied him for it.

He was bent over the laptop, frowning in confusion, consternation and concentration, when Youji crept up behind him and snapped the collar about his neck, earning himself an elbow in the ribs for his trouble. By the smile on his face, the look on Ken's own was more than adequate compensation for it.

"Fuck off. Youji, what the Hell are you doing?"  
Even as he backed off, both hands raised defensively before his chest, Youji was grinning an infuriating grin that left Ken positively itching to punch it. "Knew you'd never agree to wear it, Kenken, so I figured I had nothing to lose. Hold still, will you? I wanna clip this in."  
"Clip what in? What's this around my—ow _what the fuck Kudou._ "

Spikes. What the—oh, Christ, that was a spiked collar, wasn't it. Cursing creatively, Ken shook the hand he had raised to his throat, only breaking off to suck on his fingers. Oh, very fucking funny, Kudou!

"How'm I supposed to take this damn thing off?"  
"You're not," Youji said. "Ken, it's a sex club. Trust me, you'd look weirder without it."  
"You'd know, huh," Ken muttered.  
Youji just smiled. "Hold still. This won't take long."

Ken ignored him. He turned back to the laptop, bowing his head again – Youji sighed, raised his eyes heavenward, then bent over to fix something into his untidy bangs. Ken glared and ducked his head a couple of times and told Youji to go to Hell more for the look of the thing than out of any real expectation he'd be listened to. Probably for the best, since Youji didn't. His fingers brushed against Ken's brow as he clipped something into place, then stood back.

"You'll do," he said. "Come on, let's get going before Aya finds something else to bitch about."

And, picking up his coat and slinging it over his shoulder, he walked from the room. Ken closed the laptop with a snap and followed, pausing only to grab his black leather jacket on the way. He didn't know what the Hell Youji had just clipped in his hair and didn't want to, either: it was quite bad enough he was going to be spending the evening in the company of a man wearing a leather waistcoat (fastened, if he could be bothered to fasten it, with _buckles_ of all things), low-slung leather pants and heavy-soled black boots without having to wonder just how much he looked like said leather fetishist's boy toy.

On the plus side, if plus side it was, they were going to be there with Aya and Omi. Compared to Aya and Omi's get-up, Youji's all-leather ensemble was conservative as a Sunday suit, while Ken might as well have turned up in a kimono.

Aya appeared to be wearing a corset. A real, honest-to-God corset made out of some shiny black material that could have been leather or PVC or latex, complete with laces and boning. Beneath that he wore a figure-hugging mesh short-sleeved shirt, and had poured himself into a pair of dark red leather pants with lace-up sides. Christ, those pants! The damn things were so tight Ken couldn't imagine how he'd gotten into them, unless they'd been sewn around him. One wrong move and he'd be singing Soprano for the rest of his life. His gloves were tight, black, and elbow-length; the boots were heavy and black and laced to the knees, and the soles were so thick they almost put him on eye level with Youji. Then there was the collar. The collar about Aya's neck was clearly quite functional, with a heavy metal ring resting between his clavicles.

"Are you wearing eyeliner?" Ken heard Youji ask.

Aya fixed them both with a smoldering violet glare. Yes, he was definitely wearing eyeliner… and Jesus, was that _lip gloss_? Ken essayed a glance at Youji, who was giving Aya a slightly sickly grin.

"Never mind," he was saying. "You look…" Stupid? "Very nice."

Still, it beat looking at Omi. Omi looked like the result of a head-on collision between an _anime_ convention and a photo-journalist's _expose_ on Exploited Youth. Ken owned underwear that was less revealing than Omi's shorts. Add that to knee-high boots, fishnet gloves and a red silk short-sleeved top with a Mandarin collar and you had an outfit that was one police officer away from a soliciting charge. The bracelets, the kohl-rimmed eyes and the bondage collar with the embossed dog tags hanging from it would just make his defense counsel's job that one bit harder. That wasn't the worst of it, either…

"Omi, uh…"  
"Hm?" Omi blinked owlishly up at him. "Is something the matter, Ken-kun?"  
Ken swallowed. "The, uh… _cat_ ears?"  
"Aren't they cute?" Omi beamed. "Rain bought them for me!"  
"Really. That was… uh… that was very kind of her Youji can we go?"

There was something Ken really needed to talk to him about anyway.

* * *

Some sixth sense, some awareness that what he was about to say was… was _wrong_ , just plain wrong, had Ken waiting until they were alone in Youji's Seven, driving to the club down still-congested Saturday-night streets. Aya, with Omi in tow, had gone to pick up Rain – _Calico_ – from the Meguro safehouse she still insisted on using as a base, while the two of them headed straight to the club. Well, good. At least Youji wasn't going totally out of his mind.

It was strange that it was only now that his teammates were safely elsewhere that Ken felt comfortable talking about the mission: strange, and more than a little sad. It shouldn't have been up to him to think these things.

"Youji?" Ken asked suddenly, as the Seven idled at the hundredth set of red lights they'd hit since leaving the store, "Does this feel off to you?"  
"The mission?" Youji turned to him, blinking in confusion. "Yeah, a little… why'd you ask?"  
Ken swallowed. "Me, too… I looked some stuff up," he said. Somehow, it felt like a confession. "I kinda thought… there should be more than this. You know? In the papers and things. If people are going missing. Even the rich ones – this guy ain't that rich, and there's nothing. But normally… if people turn up dead, someone says something. Even if they won't say who. They _say_ something…"  
Youji frowned. Turned to him, regarding him over one leather-clad shoulder. "Spit it out, Hidaka."  
"There's nothing," Ken said. "There ain't nothing _like_ what Manx said had been happening. There's nothing in the news, the cops don't have shit, there ain't even any missing-persons stuff that mentions this place except one and that was in 1996 and the girl had eloped, she was on honeymoon in Hamatama with her Economics professor and it wasn't even _called_ the Core back then. It's… strange."

 _Strange_.

It wasn't a cold evening, but Ken was shivering as he gazed about himself at the stalled traffic, at the knots of passersby hurrying down the sidewalk on their way to this and that. Here a gaudy cluster of girls barely older than he was, all pigtails and miniskirts and platform soles; there a little family waiting patiently for a bus, half-hidden under rucksacks and guide books and cameras, and bags emblazoned with the logo of the National Museum of Nature and Science; across the street an old man with fine, windblown hair, stumbling down the lighted steps of a bar. Just people, completely blind to the existence of the shadows, quietly getting on with their lives…

The thought didn't make him feel any happier about what they were about to do. Just ordinary people, doing all the things that ordinary people did… He was grateful when the lights changed, and Youji's car surged eagerly forward to – what?  
"What," Youji said finally in a tight, strange voice, "exactly are you implying?" He didn't take his eyes off the road.  
"I don't think he did it," Ken said. Just that, a simple little sentence, and yet he winced at the sound of it, to hear the thing he had just admitted spoken out loud. "Mitsua. I… I think he's innocent. He didn't do it and she's going to kill him anyway. _And we can't do a goddamn thing_."


	12. Not Myself Tonight

Half past nine at the Core, this month’s hottest nightspot of the century, and the street was already thronged with crowds of eager clubbers waiting to be allowed inside. As they waited, chattering excitedly, a white Porsche pulled up at the curbside and a tall, handsome redhead stepped out, casually tossing the keys to the gaping doorman as he strode around to the passenger side. The clubbers stopped talking as the door swung open, revealing a slender leg in a high-heeled ankle boot, then the shapely form of a young girl dressed in a sexy black mini-dress.

The clubbers gawped. They whispered and elbowed one another, they stared in frank admiration as the young beauty gracefully unfolded herself from the low-slung car and got to her feet.

“She’s a model,” a girl in the crowd whispered. “She did a shoot for h. naoto.”  
“She can’t be,” her friend hissed back. “She’s a singer in a band, Mami-chan’s got their first single—”  
“What do I call you?” Aya asked as he took Rain’s hand and helped her out of the car.  
“Call me Kitty,” Rain told him, smiling sweetly at him. “My name is Kitty Wilde.”

And, taking her escort’s proffered arm, the gorgeous couple swept past the press of hopefuls queuing patiently at the door and inside, Aya waving off the girl at the counter’s objections with a flash of the VIP passes Manx had handed him the night before.

It was dark and smoky inside the club. Though it was still early the place was already packed, the air hanging heavy with dry ice. Crowds clustered at the two well-stocked bars, while pallid waitresses in heavy boots, ripped stockings and lacy black basques wove their way between knots of clubbers relaxing on low red sofas and chaises or gathered about wooden tables illuminated with red and white candles and garlanded with dead roses. A grand, sweeping set of steps led from the sunken dancefloor to a candlelit balcony and bar area overlooking the whole ground floor while, beneath it, curtained-off doorways flanked by flickering candles marked off the entrances to Mitsua’s private rooms.

Above their heads, an old vampire movie played silently on several big-screen TVs: a barely-dressed brunette slithered her way toward a hysterical blonde wearing even less, but nobody paid them the slightest bit of attention. Meanwhile, over the dance floor where leather-clad bodies writhed and pawed desperately at one another, scantily-clad male and female dancers dressed as demons gyrated, bounced and swayed in metal cages to Fall Out Boy’s ‘Thks fr th Mmrs’.

It was only then that Rain realized what she had let herself in for.

“Aya,” she said in a small, anxious voice, clinging tightly to her escort's arm, “everyone's staring…”

She was right. As she and Aya glided down the three shallow, burgundy-carpeted steps into the body of the club, they turned heads; as they moved toward the dance floor, the crowds parted as if obeying an unspoken order, feasting their eyes on the two beauties as they passed them by.

Rain had truly outdone herself. Where Doctor Raven Himura, on the night of van Haal's dinner, had been as beautiful and graceful as a fairy-tale princess, Kitty Wilde was pure sexual dynamite. God, she was gorgeous! Her strapless violet-black corset dress was tight and figure-hugging in the bodice and clung nicely to her narrow waist and swelling breasts, but the skirt was loose, allowing her to move freely. The front of the corset was laced tight with purple ribbon, with two purple-and-silver buckles accenting her slender waist and, at the back, a purple bow with dangling ends rested just above her tailbone. Beneath the loose black overskirt of her dress, the hem of a ruffled purple underskirt of some translucent, lacy material could just be seen as it brushed against the tops of her milk-white thighs

The dress, of course, was just the start. A pair of cuffs made of the same violet-black material trimmed with filmy purple lace and fastened with purple ribbons covered her slender wrists and hands almost to the start of her fingers, while black garters trimmed with black lace encircled her shapely thighs. The high-heeled ankle boots she moved so deftly in were black and adorned with buckles, and a thick black leather choker with a dangling crucifix graced her delicate throat. To complete the look Rain's hair had been pulled casually but carefully into high twin pigtails tied about with filmy purple lace and curling black ribbons, her manicured nails were painted a gorgeous petroleum purple and her full, perfectly pouting lips glistened with lipstick of such a rich, deep plum it was almost black.

No wonder heads turned as she passed. No wonder the girls, understanding they couldn’t compete, glowered and turned jealous backs on her; no wonder all the men – and quite a few of the women! – were casting appreciative glances at the shapely young femme's slender yet nicely curved body encased in its tight black dress… Aya glared at them over the girl's head, his icy amethyst gaze promising pain to anyone who dared so much as lay a finger on the beauty by his side.

“It's okay,” he murmured, his lips gently grazing the top of the girl's glossy head. “I'll look after you.”

Any other time, Rain would have laughed in his face at the presumption. Imagine any man thinking that a woman like her would need _his_ protection! But here and now, trembling beneath the weight of a hundred lust-struck eyes, striding deep into the lair of the beast who had already claimed the life of the closest friend she ever had, she couldn't help but feel frightened – and, hearing Aya's words, she could only feel grateful. She swallowed hard, nodding, and clung a little closer to his side.

“I know,” she whispered back. “I trust you…”

(And if only he had known what an honor that was!)

“Aya-san, let's dance.”

As the opening chords to ‘I’m Not Okay’ by My Chemical Romance rang out through the crowded club, she took his hand and, smiling, led him down the stairs and onto the dance floor, guiding him deftly into the middle of the throng. All Aya could do was stumble after her, gazing anxiously about himself at the faces of the curious clubbers who had ringed them as she turned to him, smiling eagerly up at him through her untidy bangs.

“Ah… Kitty, I can't really dance…”  
The girl’s smile broadened as she touched one slim finger to her lips as if she knew a great secret. “I can teach you.”

* * *

Ken said, “I don’t see the fire exits.”  
“Why,” Youji asked him from halfway down his second gin and lime of the evening, “do you want a fire exit? Thinking of bolting for the door?”  
“No,” Ken said. “I’m just worried about all these goddamn candles. What movie’s that from?”  
“ _Return to Vampire Bordello_ or something. It’s not even worth it for the girls, Ken.”

The logic was simple: they weren’t here to enjoy themselves. Seeing as one glance at the place told both Youji and Ken there was no risk of anything like that happening even accidentally, the best thing they could do was find somewhere to put themselves that wasn’t too packed and watch for the target. That had seen the two of them making their way to the balcony simply by default, colonizing a low table with a decent view of the dancefloor, and settling down to wait.

Depressingly, it seemed very likely to be a long wait. According to Kritiker’s intelligence Mitsua usually arrived at the club at about eleven, and never retreated to the back rooms before twelve. That left them a clear hour and a half to drink in the ambience before he arrived. Ken would rather have drunk bleach.

“Christ,” he said, “this music’s fucking awful. How do you even meet girls in places like this?”  
Youji shrugged. “I don’t. The places I usually go to, the Miles Davis never gets loud enough to need earplugs. Want another drink?”  
“Another beer,” Ken said. “Not American beer. Asahi Super Dry.”

Youji just nodded, got to his feet, then laughed, shook his head, and turned to flag down one of the passing waitresses before getting back into his seat and honestly, what kind of self-respecting rock club had a damn waitress service anyway? Sure the girl who was sashaying toward them, pulling a pen from - Ken quickly turned away, flushing awkwardly - from between her frankly monumental cleavage wasn't exactly hard on the eyes, but it was still pretty ridiculous. Whatever happened to joining the scrum at the bar and taking your chances?

One dry Asahi and another gin and lime, please—the girl was about to head off when Ken decided he wanted food. He was studying the menu looking for something he vaguely recognized (dammit, and he'd wanted yakitori - no chance of that, even _here_ everything was American) when the girl threw her arms about his neck, and his train of thought was quite comprehensively derailed.

“Hey, there you are, honey!”

The voice was sexy and musical, but also slightly breathless. Ken's head snapped up, brows furrowing in confusion – then he blinked. Once, twice. Christ, he'd better not have been blushing again!

The voice’s owner was tall and pale and nicely curved, with long, shining brown hair and wide sapphire orbs, and even in the half-light of the club, it was plain that she was quite beautiful. She was dressed in a tight purple tee with a stylized heart screen-printed onto the front of it over a black and white striped long-sleeved top, A white polka-dotted belt encircled her narrow waist, and she had a black polka-dotted miniskirt on. On her feet she wore white sixties-style knee-high boots, and purple and black striped over-the-knee socks encased her shapely legs. A hairpin in the shape of a cluster of small purple flowers was pinned to one side of her dark brown bangs, and her ears had been pierced in several places. This close Ken could smell her perfume, beguilingly sweet as cherry kool-aid. What the Hell, Ken wondered, did she want with them?

“Youji?” Ken tore his gaze away from the girl's doll-beautiful face, and turned to his friend. “Do you…”  
But Youji was looking just as confused as Ken felt. “She's nothing to do with me, Kenken, I never met her before.”  
“Just go with it,” the girl pleaded in a low, sexy whisper, and her frightened blue orbs were beseeching as she bent to whisper in Ken's ear. “ _Please_! I can't let them—” she looked quickly and nervously back over her shoulder, gesturing with the tilt of her head to a pair of bouncers in sunglasses and expensive-looking black suits standing guard by one of the curtained-off doors “—see me. Pretend I'm with you. Kiss me.”  
“Youji?”  
Youji just smiled - Christ, he was no help! “Well you heard the lady, Kenken.”  
“Uh…” Ken managed. Was she ever going to let go of his neck? “It's really… nice to see you?”  
“Don't mind him,” Youji smiled. “He's hopeless. Won't you sit down?”  
The girl raised her head, a hank of her soft, sweet-smelling hair brushing against Ken's cheek. “Thank you.”

She unwound her arms from about Ken's throat, drawing an upholstered chair close to his side and sitting hurriedly down, giving the boy a wide, dizzying smile as she did so that had him coloring and looking away. Mary mother of God what was keeping the target?!

“Yakitori skewers,” Ken said. “And edamame.”  
The waitress, a bored expression on her pretty, contemptuous face, just nodded. She scribbled it down without so much as a second's thought – what happened to the bit where neither of them were on the menu? – then turned to the girl. “And you?”  
“Me?” The girl looked awkward. “Well, I don't know if I…”  
“It's fine,” Youji said with a chuckle, handing her the menu. “Just order anything you'd like.”  
“Thank you. I'll have a Singapore Sling and some potato wedges, if that's okay. With barbecue sauce.”

The waitress dispatched, the girl slumped back into her seat for a moment, an expression of profound relief crossing her pretty face. She sighed, she closed her eyes, she mimicked utter exhaustion - then she sat up, orbs shining as she gave them both a grateful smile.

“Thanks,” she said a little shyly. “I seriously thought I was in trouble there.”  
“It's fine,” Youji said. He returned the smile, offered her a cigarette, and kicked Ken hard under the table. Hidaka, you don't ask questions like that…  
Because Ken had asked, “Oh, why?” Then winced.  
The girl didn't seem to have noticed the wince. “I thought those men had recognized me,” she said. “If anyone found out I was here—” She broke off, shaking her head as if hoping to chase a bad memory away. “No, I can't explain. But thank you for playing along, I really appreciate it! A lot of guys wouldn't have done, so thanks. Aurora.”  
Ken blinked at her. “What?”  
“My name.”

Aurora Jaide Kino was eighteen years old. She was half-American, but had lived all her life in Japan. She was a first-year college student, studying art and design, and she wanted to be a graphic designer when she left college. She lived with a boyfriend – _it's kinda complicated_ – and something had happened, and she'd been desperate to get out of the house: just for a little while, she'd wanted to get away. She'd come to the club because the doorman knew her face and would let her in for free, but if any of the senior staff saw her she'd be in serious trouble.

Ken was a florist. He sold flowers.

“It's a really good thing we met,” Aurora was saying seemingly to Ken alone, and thank God the drinks were there. “I was beginning to feel lonely. It's sad being alone in a place like this, don't you think?”  
“Uh, well. I don't usually come to places like this,” Ken said a little awkwardly.  
The girl sat up straight, her eyes widening in surprise. Ken might as well have announced that he spent his free time on the moon. “Really? This is your first time? What do you usually do for fun, then?”  
Ken hesitated. Said, “uh… sports and… and I've got a motorbike and stuff? And I guess I play soccer.”  
“Oh,” Aurora said – just that. Was it Ken's imagination, or did she sound rather disappointed? “Well, I’m glad you’re here tonight, Ken-san. I feel so much safer knowing you’re here.”

Ken managed a nod, gave her a weak grin then shot Youji a look that as good as screamed _Youji help_. Youji patted him on the shoulder, gave him a reassuring smile and announced his intention to go and buy some more cigarettes and if you can’t be good be careful. Good Christ with friends like these Ken hardly needed Schwarz and Schreient in his life – never mind _Rain_!

Aurora, watching Youji slip away and lose himself in the crowd with an oddly speculative look on her pretty face, put her hand on his forearm. Ken moved it.

“Is he your friend?”  
Ken started. “What? Uh… I guess? We… kinda work together and stuff, he's pretty annoying. Why'd you ask?”  
“Oh,” Aurora said with a small sigh, “no reason. I just…”

Just what?

Ken got the feeling he didn't really want to know. There was something about the way she had said it that left him feeling quite profoundly uneasy - something slightly off about it, not quite (how could he put this?) not quite natural. Her words, like her sigh, seemed strangely false. Almost even stagy…

But he said, because he didn't know what else to say, “What's wrong?”  
“Huh?” Aurora's head snapped up, fear suddenly etched across her delicate features – just for a moment. He fancied he could almost see her forcing herself to calm, and that looked all wrong too. “N… nothing's wrong! Why should there be something the matter?”  
“It don't look like nothing,” Ken said: no matter how strange this felt, he had to ask. “You okay?”  
“I…” The girl looked away, chewing on her lip, then dropped her gaze, listlessly poking at the melting ice in her frilly drink with the stem of the cocktail umbrella. “It's nothing, Ken-san, really. You wouldn't be interested.”  
“Try me.”  
“It's not very interesting,” Aurora murmured: was it his imagination, or had she started to blush? “It's really not very— you'd really want to know about a girl like me? But Ken-san, I… you wouldn't… what if something happened because I—”  
Okay, this was getting annoying. “What if what happened? How the Hell'd I know that when you ain't told me yet? _Try_ me.”  
Aurora flushed, fidgeted, worried at her lip. She sneaked a look at him from beneath her bangs. She said, in a very small voice, “Okay.”

Yeah, Hidaka, you probably are going to be sorry that you asked.

Aurora Jaide Kino had been born in Tokyo, in Meguro ward. Her parents were rich, but they had never loved one another. Her father, Touma Kino, had been forced to leave his childhood sweetheart and marry her mother, Vanadise, after a drunken one-night stand that had left her pregnant. Vanadise, a tall, beautiful woman who had come to Japan in search of a modeling career that had never taken off, was an ambitious and spiteful gold-digger who had viewed her unborn child as nothing more than a way to entrap the wealthy Touma into a loveless marriage.

Touma spent as little time at home as was possible, preferring to live in an apartment in the city with the girl he loved. Only Vanadise's threats to reveal what a sham their marriage was kept him from leaving altogether. He resented his daughter, seeing her as little more than the chain that kept him shackled to her terrible, selfish mother, and wanted nothing to do with her: Vanadise saw the girl as an inconvenience. All Aurora was to her was a meal ticket, the means to ensnare Touma, ensure she could live the life of luxury she longed for. After Aurora was born Vanadise took no interest in her whatsoever, except to play the perfect wife and mother to her neighbors.

(Okay, that’s pretty sad, Ken thought. Then he thought, but why is she telling me this? I don't even know this girl and here she is giving me chapter and verse on her entire life—

(The edamame came, and the yakitori skewers. Confused, Ken ate one. It tasted like yakitori.) 

Aurora had been raised in a prison of privilege, unable to convince anyone that the ‘gentle, loving, perfect’ mother who doted over her in public was anything but as soon as the neighbors’ backs were turned. Worse was to come when, not long after her daughter turned five, Vanadise rediscovered religion.

“I don’t get it,” Ken said. “Why’s that so terrible?”  
Aurora shivered. Said, so quietly Ken could hardly hear it, “Mom’s a Christian.”  
“Her and a lotta people.” Like me. Kinda. “And?”

It wasn’t long before Vanadise decided that her shy, unloved daughter was wicked. Depraved. An ugly, stupid, ungrateful little monster who disrespected her mother and was sure to go to Hell. The girl grew up thinking herself sinful. Every night she prayed to be made good, but no matter how hard she tried, she was never good enough. Vanadise kept her isolated, forbade all friendships and ‘worldly’ pleasures; she lectured and needled and blamed. It was Aurora’s fault father was never home, her fault mother didn’t love her. She was a wicked girl, and she was being punished.

Terrible though things were, they got more terrible still when Vanadise found out, the day Aurora turned fourteen, that her daughter was not like the other girls her age. She was different.

“Different?”

(Halfway down his third beer, Ken wondered if Aurora realized she was making him feel _really fucking uncomfortable_.)

“ _Different_.” Aurora nodded. “Promise you won’t laugh? I can draw things that are true.”  
What? Ken blinked at her. What did that even mean? “You can what?”  
“Coincidences… and secrets. Things people try to hide. Ken-san, if I drew you right now, from memory… I would draw you as you are in your soul, not as I see you now.”  
“Please don’t,” Ken said unthinkingly. (Seriously, why are you telling me this? I don’t even know you.)  
Aurora hardly seemed to notice the interruption. “I’ve always been able to, ever since I was little. I kept it from mom for years, but on my fourteenth birthday… she found out.”

On that dreadful day, Aurora had come home from school to find her mother in her bedroom. Vanadise, her face contorted with fury, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to her worktable where a charcoal drawing was displayed – a drawing of Vanadise embracing a young man, gazing up at his handsome, unlined face with naked animal lust.

_Why did you draw that,_ the woman had demanded.  
_I didn’t mean to,_ Aurora stammered. _It just came out, I… I was thinking of you, and—_

Vanadise slapped her. She snatched up the drawing and tore it to shreds. She toppled an easel, trampled her charcoals, tossed a sketchbook at her daughter’s head, screaming that she was a sinner. Aurora was lustful, she was wicked, she was the Devil’s daughter, not hers – that only the Devil could have made her draw such a shameful thing. Finally she had Aurora bring all her artwork, all her pencils and paints and paper, to the garden, and burned them before her eyes. You will never draw again, she screamed. Do you understand? _Never_.

That same evening, she dragged Aurora to church, forced her to confess everything to the priest. Then she threw her out, slammed the door in her face and left her sobbing on the doorstep.

For the next few years she had lived with an aunt, one of the only people who had ever been kind to her, but the unwanted attentions of her adult son made life even more unbearable than Vanadise, with her rages and her restrictions, could ever have done. Then, shortly after Aurora had turned seventeen, she met Jet Arashi.

“I thought he was my savior,” she said, softly and sadly. “But he turned out to be the worst of them all.”

* * *

“I give up with you, Hidaka,” Youji said wearily. “I really do.”

If Ken had thought the dance floor was something the Fire Marshal would have loved to certify, it was nothing compared to the room Youji had guided him to, a small curtained-off bolthole leading from a shadow-veiled passageway. It was furnished solely with an oversized and overstuffed couch flanked by a pair of occasional tables each burdened with a vast pot of dying roses, and bathed in the light of dozens of candles. The flames flickered and danced in the breeze from the corridor, reflected endlessly back in the vast, gilt-framed mirrors that lined the wood-paneled walls.

It was beautiful, it was elegant, but the whole place left Ken feeling quite profoundly uneasy. Screw the roses, send me a fire extinguisher.

“What the Hell’d _I_ do?” Ken demanded. “I asked her what was up and she told me her entire goddamn _life_ story, that’s not me failing with girls, that’s _that_ girl being _out of her goddamn mind_!”  
Youji said nothing for a moment, simply surveyed him over the rim of his _n_ th gin and lime. “You must have said something to encourage her.”  
“She seemed sad so I asked her why. She spent the next fifteen minutes telling me about her mommy issues.”  
“And that’s all?”  
“That,” Ken said quietly and definitely, “is _all_.”  
“Sheesh. Hate to say it, kiddo, but you—” Youji pointed one finger at Ken as if it were a cocked pistol, “—are _well_ outta that.”  
Ken sighed. Took a swig of his beer. “I never wanted to be in it in the first place.” 

He probably shouldn’t have looked at Youji like that. Nope. Really shouldn’t, having done that, been caught looking: Youji blinked at him, quirking one eyebrow in a silent statement, though what the guy thought he was trying to state Ken had no idea. Thank God for the fourth beer (or maybe it was the fifth beer? Eh, something like that anyway…) or he thought he’d really have been quite embarrassed. 

“What are we supposed to be doing anyway?”  
Youji shrugged. Said, offhandedly, “Best intel we got the target’s in his office. Omi wants to know when he hits the club.”  
“And his office?”  
“Down the hall, Kenken,” Youji said slowly and patiently, as if it were only painfully obvious: geez, imagine you having to ask a thing like that. Where else would it be? “He’s gotta pass us to get to the balcony.”  
“Oh,” Ken said. Then, “What if he sees us on the way past?”  
“Easy,” Youji said with a wink and a grin. “We act like we’re making out.”  
“ _Youji_!”  
“Don’t be so prissy, I’ll make it worth your while— huh?”

Footsteps.

Not the target’s footsteps, that was obvious. Even if they hadn’t been approaching from the wrong end of the corridor their owner was far lighter on their feet than the target could ever have been: it was a woman’s tread, in high-heeled shoes, and she was hurrying as if she were nervous. Youji and Ken just about had time to trade a quick glance, all lowered brows and suspicion-narrowed eyes, before Aurora Jaide Kino practically fell into the room, breathless and disheveled with her long brown hair tumbled over her face.

“ _Ken_ -san!”

The girl flung herself at him, wrapping her slender arms about his neck and burying her face in the crook of his neck. Ken stumbled, staggering backward; it was all he could do not to fall. He stared down at Aurora, delicate yet nicely curved form nestling close to his firm chest, as she clung to him as if he were a lifeline. He might have been driftwood, the only thing in the world she could still be sure of and she was shaking, shaking so badly Ken could feel it. Her narrow shoulders heaved.

The look on his face said he was lost without a map. Eyes wide, Ken gazed frantically at Youji over the top of Aurora’s trembling auburn head and what the Hell, he was thinking, do I do now? He didn’t even know what to do with his hands—

“Well, well. What have we here? A pair of lost little kittens?”

Schwarz. _Schuldig_. The flame-haired German was dressed in a peaked German officer’s cap and a long black trenchcoat, worn open over lace-up thigh-high boots and indecently brief shorts, his broad chest bare beneath the leather of the coat. Flexing a riding crop in between gloved hands, he gave the little group an assessing once-over, the broad, sadistic grin on his face twisting to a lascivious leer as his gaze alighted on the nubile form of the terrified girl.

Perhaps feeling the weight of his gaze, Aurora raised her head, glancing fearfully up at the redhead, then gave a gasp. For a moment she stiffened, then buried her face in Ken’s chest again, little hands curling into fists in the fabric of his shirt and her body trembling harder than ever.

“Schuldig,” Youji said.

The truly weird thing about it was it wasn’t a surprise at all.

“If I ask what the Hell all this is about,” Ken said to nobody in particular, “am I going to regret it?”  
Of course he was. Aurora raised her head and looked beseechingly up at Ken, dazzling sapphire optics wide and fearful as she gazed at him through a curtain of her own tangled hair. “He…” she stammered, shooting a quick, fearful glance back at the smirking redhead, “he… that man, he said he knew where the boss was, he— he told me he knew I’d got in without paying and the boss wouldn’t like it, he said I’d have to find some other means to repay him, he was… he was going to tell my boyfriend and they were… they were going to make me… oh God, Ken-san!” And she buried her head in his chest again, her entire body heaving with sobs.

What? Baffled, Ken shot another glance at Youji; Youji simply shrugged, giving him a wry look. Your guess is as good as mine, kiddo, that really did make no sense at all.

Schuldig, far too busy laughing evilly at the trembling girl huddled against Ken’s chest, ignored them. “Oh, poor little girl,” he said through a wicked smirk, “don’t you realize I was only toying with you? A child like you is nothing but a game – the pretty new kitten downstairs is the one I’m _really_ here for.”  
“New kitten,” Youji said. “Rain.”  
“Rain,” Schuldig purred, his evil smile only broadening. “ _Yes_. Such exquisite beauty – and such ferocity beneath it. She’s a rare prize, that girl – far too rare for _you_ , Weiss! You don’t even begin to understand what you’ve got in that sweet little kitty, do you? You know, you should be more careful with her… watch the wolves don’t come and steal her away. You tell your friend that, the redhead. Tell him he ought to watch his step.”  
Ken shot another glance at Youji, who really didn’t seem to know what he should be doing with his face. “Uh, thanks,” he managed, after an entirely way too long a pause. “I’ll… I’ll pass that on, shall I?”  
“Tell him!” Schuldig said dangerously, slapping the crop slowly against his palm. Aurora whimpered. “Tell him that girl’s nothing but trouble. She’s a threat to all of you – and to herself. Abyssinian’s playing with fire. Just wait until you know the truth… until you know what kind of a monster your sweet little Serenity really is!”  
“Are you feeling all right?” Ken asked. He couldn’t help himself, really.

Schuldig laughed. Laughed long and loud, throwing his head back and – God damn it, he was actually _cackling_. A full-out maniacal laugh, just like in the movies. For a moment Ken thought he was laughing at him, only to realize that this was clearly just the point in the conversation where Schuldig laughed like a supervillain.

Youji lit another cigarette on a nearby candle, and waited. So did Ken.

“Oh, you just _wait_ , Weiss! She is more powerful than you know, more dangerous… she is like us! Your sweet little kitten down there – the girl should be ours. She _will_ be ours! And,” Schuldig hissed, “when we take her and make her our own, when she and Schwarz become one… then she will destroy you all.”  
“She won’t!” Aurora. She pulled away from Ken’s chest, little hands balled into fists, glaring furiously up at the Schwarz redhead through azure occuli blazing with sudden rage. “She will never consent to be yours! No woman would willingly have a man like you! Get out!”  
Schuldig merely smirked; the shapely brunette set her jaw against it, determined not to run from him again. “Heh. Looks like Abyssinian’s not the only one should keep a closer watch on his woman! You should put a leash on that one, Siberian. Might get herself hurt if she carries on like this.”  
“What,” Ken demanded, “the Hell is wrong with you?” And, while you’re at it, what’s going on?  
“Patience, kitten,” Schuldig cackled. “You’ll see.”

Then, with a final wicked smirk, Schuldig was gone. He turned on his heel and swept from the room, leather coat billowing behind him like the wings of a monstrous bat, leaving Aurora staring after him in naked dismay.

“Ken-san…” she stammered, cobalt orbs huge and troubled. And, taking a tentative step toward him, then another, she rested one delicate hand on his arm. 

And Ken pulled away, barely noticing the hurt look that crept across her face and made itself at home there: he was too busy reaching for his beer, tipping his head back and pulling on it until he had drained the bottle dry. Slamming the empty bottle down on one of the tables, he turned to Youji and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Let’s go.”

He should have known that Aurora would consider herself included in that. As the two young men made their way back to the balcony and from there to the stairs, she followed, hurrying after Ken on her impractical heels, then wrapping both her delicate little hands about his arm. Ken was dropping a hint here, and Aurora was not taking it. Was determined, in fact, to completely ignore it.

“Look, Aurora, don’t take this personal but you should go. It’s not safe here.”

Aurora just smiled up at him, and her smile was wide and beautiful and oblivious, and somehow entirely unsettling. Ken recoiled from that smile (he just couldn’t help it, it was – it was weird, it was wrong, there was something wrong here and he was damned if he knew what) and she didn’t seem to notice that either…

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll be safe with you, Ken-san.”  
“Aurora—”  
“I trust you,” she said, and something in her voice had Ken wanting to bolt. “Don’t worry about me!”

He didn’t, though. Ken just sighed – what else could he do? – and carried on down the stairs, trying his damndest to ignore the girl nestling her glossy head against the curve of his neck. It wasn’t until he was halfway down that he realized Youji hadn’t followed. Was, in fact, standing at the top of the stairs, gazing out across the club as if he were trying to remember something very important.

“Oi, Kudou!”  
Youji started; he seemed to shake himself, he hurried to catch them up. “Hey, Ken,” he said. “Didn’t you say this place used to be called something else?”  
“Huh? Oh… oh, yeah. It was The Angel of… of somewhere, I think. It was in English. Harlow.”  
“ _Harlem_.”  
Youji spoke so quietly Ken barely caught it over Paramore shrieking about something or other. He blinked. “What?”  
“The Angel of Harlem,” Youji said tightly. Something was working in his jaw; he looked angrier than Ken thought he could remember seeing him for a very long time. “God _damn_ it!”  
“Youji?”  
“It’s nothing, Ken. Nothing at all… she’s got to be stopped.”  
Ken sighed. Shook his head. “Tell me something I don’t know.”  
“At least Omi looks happy,” Youji said: he was gazing out across the dancefloor, a slightly distant look on his face. “Guess that’s something to be said for oh holy shit.”

Ken stooped short, staring up at Youji in consternation. Youji – well, Youji was a smooth talking guy, wasn’t he? Of course he was. He didn’t swear, not unless he really meant it. If all he could think of to say about something was holy shit, they were really in trouble. Wide-eyed and anxious Ken scanned the club, struggling to follow his friend’s gaze.

At first he could see nothing, just bodies, too many of them, packed together so tightly it was nearly impossible to tell what bits belonged to which person – then he spotted it. A familiar flash of honey-blonde hair topped with those stupid cat ears Rain had foisted off on him: there was Omi, eyes closed, hands thrown above his head, dancing dangerously close to a petite girl in a ruffled black dress trimmed with red ribbons and white lace and far more of either than he would ever have thought necessary, a maid’s headband garlanded with more flamboyant ribbons in her dark hair.

She looked like nobody Ken had ever seen in his life, but that was Ouka Takaki all right. First Sakura in an outfit so pink a Barbie doll would have called it overkill; now Ouka, dressed like Rain’s understudy and hanging out in sex clubs…

“We’d better find Aya,” he said. “This is getting way too weird for my liking.”

_-to be continued_


End file.
